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ROAD STORY
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JULIENNE VAN LOON grew up in country New South Wales. She studied creative writing at the University of Wollongong and later at the University of Queensland. Julienne now lives in Perth, where she teaches in the Faculty of Media, Society and Culture at Curtin University of Technology. Road Story is her first book.
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ROAD STORY Julienne van Loon
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First published in 2005 Copyright © Julienne van Loon 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Van Loon, Julienne, 1970–. Road story. ISBN 1 74114 621 6. I. Title. A823.3 Set in 11.5/15pt Adobe Garamond by Asset Typesetting Pty Ltd Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Nothing is worth clinging to. (Sabbe dhamma- na-lam abhinivesa-ya.) from the Majjhima-Nika-ya
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1 iana Kooper is running. She is looking straight ahead through the warm night rain, all silvery in the fluorescent streetlight. The footpath beneath her is so shiny and black it could be liquid. God, how she can run. A siren starts up somewhere behind her. Diana is cutting through the old park near City Road, cool parcels of darkness enveloping her briefly between splashes of milky light. She passes the pool where they sometimes used to lie beneath the shadecloth eating Drumsticks. The four a.m. rain is falling heavy on her face and her shoes squelch, once as the foot hits the ground and again as the heel is lifted. Squelch-squalch, squelch-squalch. Diana is running for the intersection of Broadway and City Road. She can feel blisters forming on her heels, and glass shards from the car windscreen sliding about in
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her left boot. But she doesn’t stop, can’t. Her line of flight curves gently around the edges of an empty pond. ‘Hey!’ calls a drunkard, ‘Hey carn, where ya goin’ darlin’?’ A vehicle’s brakes squeal to a halt at the traffic lights. Diana dodges a taxi. She moves diagonally across Broadway, passing the gas cookware shop and then the homeless guys standing around a lit gallon drum on Abercrombie Street. She passes a nightclub they went to once, where the entrance is a large red double door opening onto a steep flight of stairs. The place is all quiet now, the big doors closed. She takes in the sharp scent of urine as she goes by. It’s a mid-week morning and an hour before dawn. A street sweeper, its reverse warning blaring, comes out of an alleyway near the University of Technology. Diana’s crossing the street again and she can almost see the clock tower now. Squelch-squalch, squelch-squalch. Her breath is regular now, her step firm. Of course, in running, there are things Diana Kooper is intending to leave behind her. Some are everyday things: the soapy white heads on the morning beers she serves for breakfast punters at the bar in Botany Road; the sound of the drag queens arguing in the room adjoining her King Street bedsit; the glossy pictures of expensive destinations — Spain, Zaire, Chicago — in the travel shop window below. And then there are things that go beyond the everyday: the theft of all her valuables; the eviction notice owing to rental arrears; the letter from East Sydney TAFE documenting the extent of her failure in core units in the Certificate III of 2
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Photography. But worst of all, there is this latest incident. Back on the corner of City Road and Cleveland Street she has left a white Suzuki hatchback wedged against a power pole, doors open. And there’s a girl on the passenger side, no pulse. If that girl is dead, Diana reasons, it is not necessarily because of the accident. If she is dead, it is not entirely my fault. ‘I love you, Nic,’ she had whispered in the girl’s direction. The car engine was humming, the shattered windscreen glistening in the night rain as she turned away. But before she could start to run, Diana was forced to vomit. She bent over the swirling roadside gutter and watched the stormwater carry the clotted mess of soupy mucus away. Nicole Clarke is wedged halfway through a broken windscreen and is bleeding as her closest friend crosses up onto the footpath outside Central Station. The old clock says twenty past nine. That’s not the correct time. Diana slows her pace.
Central Station is full of people with nowhere to go. There are the homeless, the mentally ill and those too drunk or drug-fucked to find their way to any place else. Figures drape themselves across the orange plastic seats, many of them sleeping. Those that are awake gaze into the middle distance, avoiding eye contact with the wet girl as she makes her way toward the monitors announcing arrivals and departures. There are lumpy bodies sleeping on the cold hard 3
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floor, heads on bags, faces covered. An obese woman, her small orchestra of bulging plastic bags gathered around her, sits reciting the words to a Duran Duran song without much sense of rhythm or key. At the Eddy Avenue end of the large open station, charity workers hand out sandwiches and tea. The first train out is at 4.52 a.m. It’s going to Lithgow. Diana’s pulse races as she leans forward to catch her breath, hands on hips. Her face is hot and red. She paces to cool down. She is thinking. She has nothing with her but the ATM card in the back pocket of her jeans. Her keys are still in the Suzuki’s ignition and her bag is on the back seat. It’s twenty minutes until the train goes. She can’t go back. She waits. Before long, Diana is sitting on the westbound country train, just as any normal person would. There is nothing unusual about the way she looks vacantly out the window, or listens to the routine beat of the tracks passing beneath. She dozes for a while. At Lithgow she exits the damp station building and turns right, passing the old railway workers’ cottages on one side, the railway tracks on the other. She walks on. The Suzuki will have been towed away by now, leaving a soft smudge of white paint around the metal pole and a sea of glass shrapnel along the gutter’s edge. And Nicole? She’ll be gone too, picked up by the ambos, laid out on a stretcher, taken somewhere else. The traffic on City Road will be racing by, regardless, brakes squealing, drivers cursing, the daily pattern of the city carrying on. 4
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As Diana reaches the Great Western Highway the midmorning light shines gently, but after a few kilometres of walking, it starts to get hot. It’s early December and the cicadas are deafening in the tall eucalypts along the roadside. Her mind is numb now, the heat distilling everything. She listens to the sound of her own breath in harmony with the drone of the insects, and notices small things: flies; a discarded cigarette lighter; ants. She walks with her thumb out to one side and after six or seven Ks — an hour, maybe two — a roaring black semi stops for her. Diana climbs up into the high cabin of a brand-new Volvo. It’s thoroughly flash, boasting lamb’s wool seat covers, refrigerated air, a mini fridge. The dash is alight with digitation. Everything is gleaming. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Out west.’ ‘Going home then?’ ‘Guess so.’ The driver’s name is Zac. He is big and black, a Maori, pronouncing his ‘i’s and ‘e’s like a true Kiwi. There is something comforting about him, a kind of contentment coming out through a glint in his eyes. ‘This machine’s got everything a man could want,’ he announces after a few minutes. ‘The good Lord Jesus knew just what he was doing when he let this little baby off the production line.’ Apparently Jesus found Zac in the middle of a bender five years ago. Jesus rescued him from Satan. Jesus is the 5
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saviour. He is the only way. He also invented the Harley Davidson. Diana nods a lot, looking forward at the road then drifting into short fits of sleep, but the shadow of Nicole presses into her mind so that she can almost sense the other girl’s body right there in the cabin of the Volvo. Nicole might as well be sitting there, between Diana and the driver, taking comfort in the soft seat cover. Diana places a hand, palm down, on the blank seat between her and Zac. The truck moves west, away, away.
‘Let’s see who can piss like a man!’ Four years ago, Diana walked into the girls’ toilets at Nyngan High, aged fourteen and a half. She crossed out of the sunlight and into the cool cement damp, pungent with urine, white with cigarette smoke. There was the bare arse of Nicole Clarke. She was standing on a toilet seat, one foot either side of the bowl, the cubicle door wide open. In the next cubicle, Artemis Takos was doing the same and further along Lee-anne Black too, green and white checked tunics held up above hips, undies scrunched in hand. Diana smirked as the others pissed sporadically onto the toilet seats, but mostly onto their own shoes and socks, and onto the floor, shrieking with laughter. ‘Oh, fuck me!’ ‘Oh, shit!’ 6
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‘Oh, bad idea, Lee-anne!’ Nicole was first to jump down off the seat, avoiding the puddles, flinging off her netball shoes and ankle socks, trying to hoist her legs up into the long narrow handbasin and turning on a row of taps full bore. ‘Oh, shame!’ Diana hadn’t known whether to back out quietly or laugh out loud. ‘So, youse are the tough chicks, hey?’ She was daring herself to keep talking, Winfield Blue in hand, the first few lines crucial. ‘And youse can’t even piss straight!’ Nicole Clarke flashed her a look, all fierce brown eyes and round cheeks. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ she said. ‘I’m the new chick,’ said Diana. ‘You’re Nicole Clarke, right?’ ‘Who’s asking?’ ‘Diana Kooper. Your cousin Kellyanne in Wilcannia reckons you’re all right. She reckons you and me are gonna get along fine.’ And Nicole smiled, broad and wide, her eyes glistening with the prospect of a new challenge. It seems a lifetime ago, that meeting. That was when Diana Kooper was sharp, cool, quick. That was when Diana Kooper was going places. She and Nicole Clarke, new sisters. Family. She and Nicole Clarke. They wouldn’t need school any more. Wouldn’t need anybody. • • • 7
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Diana is awake again as she and Zac hit the other side of Dubbo. They pass lazy creek beds curving up beside the road edge and then scurrying away. Big trees stand lonely, sober in the middle of huge paddocks. Here and there salt rises up. Soon they come to the cotton country on the outskirts of Nevertire, little traces of white fluff wafting along the sides of the road like lost Santa trimmings. Toward Nyngan the bone-coloured squares of wheat and sheep or cattle and barley are woven loosely across the native scrub. Diana soaks up the familiar colour of it, the ghostly greys, greens and blacks against the dark orange dirt. She watches thin pencil lines of fencing leaning and breaking up as they speed by.
Back in Nyngan, when they were kids, Nicole’s mum’s place was always full of people. Nicole slept in the closed-in verandah which she shared with two of her sisters, and sometimes other kids too, if they had family visiting. There was no privacy there. Diana’s mum’s place, in contrast, was always empty of people, the linen in bundles on the floor, the fridge empty, the ashtrays full. The girls didn’t like either house much, and spent most of their time down at the river where they lay in bikinis beneath the biggest gums. Boys pulled up regularly in panel vans and station wagons, arms full of cold beer. They were mostly older boys who’d already given up school and who’d started mucking about with car engines and designing bongs. 8
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‘I don’t like sex,’ said Nicole one afternoon when she saw Peter O’Toole’s Holden pulling up. ‘It’s boring.’ ‘Yeah,’ Diana reckoned, though she didn’t really know back then. Nicole’s skin tanned easily. It was a gorgeous, even brown. Diana’s own skin could turn a healthy tan if she was diligent, but beneath the straps of her cozzies, or below the line of her ankle socks, she remained pale and pink. On summer nights they walked all over town, declaring to each other matter-of-factly the long lists of things they would never do in the future. Never get married. Never work in the abattoirs. Never perm their hair. And there were the lists of things they might do, if they felt like it. Might become an actress. Might have heaps and heaps of kids. Might buy that old MG carcass Lee-anne Black’s dad has in his garage and do it up, paint it canary yellow and drive it all the way to Sydney. Nicole knew who lived in just about every house in Nyngan, and she usually had some story about someone’s uncle or their dog or their baby. Diana listened gladly, then swapped a tale about some family in Wilcannia or Dubbo or Cobar, painting Nicole a picture of every street and every town she and her mum had ever lived in. She and her mum moved all the time. They were always starting afresh. Sometimes the girls walked right out to the edge of town, where the street kerbing fell away behind them and the sheep paddocks marked the huge flat world beyond. Here they forgot about the town itself, and looked toward a future without it. 9
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‘You’ll get a reputation for yourselves, youse girls,’ Nicole’s grandmother would say when they wandered back to Nicole’s place past three a.m. and found Nan Farley sitting in the breeze just outside the front door. She always sat there. ‘Yeah, Nan.’ ‘And you’re gonna regret it later, if youse don’t quit waggin’ school. You’ll have no education.’
They turn on to the Barrier Highway and Zac pumps up the stereo. He’s playing American gospel, all soaring harmonies and choir with great soul swing and rhythm. Diana doesn’t mind it at first. It reminds her of the Rolling Stones and stuff her mum once played. Freedom, oh freedom, oh freedom Freedom is coming Oh yes, I know! She glances across at Zac who is humming a little and nodding his head and sometimes drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. On the stereo the gospel singers’ fingers are clicking, hands clapping. Movement and music — it sounds good. But this sound system could make any sort of shit sound okay, even gospeltruckin’ stuff. People gettin’ ready, there’s a train a-comin’ Picking up passengers coast to coast All you need is faith when you hear that diesel hummin’ Don’t need no ticket, just get on board— 10
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Nyngan is behind them now. Ahead the sunset lights up the saltbush country and masses of Eastern Grey roos gather too close to the road, taking off in swift parcels of flight back toward the scrub or fanning out across the road ahead as Zac’s rig ploughs into the dusk. The choir carries on. Joy, Joy! God’s great Joy! Joy, joy, down in my soul! Sweet, beautiful, soul-saving Joy! Oh, Joy, Joy in my soul. The lyrics are starting to get to her. All this Christian hope and sunshine. It doesn’t work like that. Not in the real world. She looks across at Zac, still tapping his fingers to the rhythm. Wake up, man. Shit! Look at him. This guy is unbelievable. ‘Listen Zac, I’ll bail out at Cobar, if that’s okay with you.’ ‘Sure thing, sweetheart.’
Zac’s brake lights blink at her as the rig pulls away. Diana makes her way down toward Linsley Street. It’s a Thursday and late-night shopping. People move slowly as they wait to cross the street or put something down in the back of their ute. There are no traffic lights. The early summer dusk lingers as if reluctant to meld into black, but here and there night lights flicker on regardless. She steps into the Public Bar at the majestic Great Western Hotel. 11
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‘I’ll get me and you some Chinese, hey, Stretch?’ The barmaid is talking loudly to some old fella down the other end of the bar. ‘Yeah, I don’t mind a bit of Chinese. I could go a bit of Chinese. Food, that is.’ ‘You right, love?’ ‘Um, how much for a room for the night?’
The Great Western Motel is a strip of bright yellow brickwork edging the carpark behind the hotel. Diana lies down on top of a shiny floral bedspread in a single room and closes her eyes. When she opens them fourteen hours have gone by. She brushes down her hair with a little bit of spit and a smooth of her hand and opens the bright green door, walking a few metres, squinting. Out beneath the covered walkway in the morning shade, straddling a motley coloured collection of vinyl kitchen chairs, her fellow guests are mumbling into their bacon, eggs and beer. ‘G’day,’ one of them nods, shifting across to make a space for her at the table. ‘G’day,’ Diana says back, taking up the chair that’s been offered. ‘Kath, Ian, Craig,’ says one of the three, pointing to the other two and then to himself. ‘Diana,’ she says. ‘Diana Kooper.’ 12
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Diana recognises Ian as someone she’d been at school with somewhere, maybe Wilcannia, maybe Dubbo. They nod at each other. ‘Sit down, mate. I won on the pokies last night. I’ll shout you breakfast,’ Craig grins. ‘Don’t listen to him,’ says Kath. ‘Breakfast is included in the tariff.’ Diana sits. The truth is she doesn’t know what to do, where to go. She has eighty-seven dollars in the bank. She could stay with a woman she calls Auntie back in Nyngan but she’d have to explain herself and doesn’t feel ready to. Her mother is in a nursing home in Broken Hill. There is nobody she knows or likes well enough around here any more. She sifts through people she once knew from Cobar, Nyngan, Wilcannia, even back east to Dubbo. It’s years since she and Nicole took flight. They were just kids. People could be anywhere now. The town of Cobar looks like every other town from her childhood, the bar like every other country pub bar. Everything is familiar yet empty. Breakfast seems like an easy thing to focus on. It arrives. She eats. ‘So you’ve pissed off from the big smoke?’ says Ian. ‘Yeah.’ ‘What are ya gonna do now?’ ‘I dunno.’ They can hear the cricket commentary from the front bar. Diana peers into the pub hallway. There is a jukebox there, in sleep mode — a flurry of light and movement but 13
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no sound. She can see a few old-timers slumped around on their bar stools toward the front of the building. Ian and Craig start to debate which of them took the ultimate childhood pushbike stack. ‘Nah, listen mate …’ ‘You haven’t even heard the worst of it.’ ‘Nah, listen, Diana, what d’ya reckon? What’s more legendary: the classic last-minute save or the injury from hell?’ ‘Fuckin’ up your own bike or fuckin’ up someone else’s bike?’ ‘Oh, yeah, I know which one you’d be better at.’ Diana scratches at mosquito bites. Kath begins to roll a cigarette. The minutes drag. It’s like falling into the abyss. Like falling out of the world. There’s too much time for absences, lost images, stray thoughts. She remembers the roos taking off from the edge of the road; the sound of Zac’s truck engine purring; the rain pelting down on City Road, plastering her hair to her face. She remembers the city itself, the pedestrians queued at every intersection, the shuffling dance of traffic, the angry uneasy harbour. Tall buildings … flash cars … beautiful clothes. Sydney. The place of dreams. She and Nicole were supposed to have grown rich there together. ‘So, what’d you do in Sydney?’ says Kath. ‘I was working in a bar. And going to TAFE.’ ‘Why’d you leave?’ ‘Huh?’ 14
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‘Why’d you leave?’ ‘Oh, just had enough, I guess.’ Someone has hit a six on the TV and two or three barfly voices cheer. Diana smiles and catches Ian’s gaze. ‘Hey, you were at school in Nyngan, eh? You were a mate of that chick, what was her name?’ he says. ‘Nicole?’ ‘Yeah, that’s the one. She was all right, eh? What’s she doin’ now?’ ‘I dunno,’ she says quickly. ‘You dunno?’ Diana looks into the ashtray, shakes her head.
The sun is high as she strolls along Marshall Street. The publican at the Grand Hotel is hosing the pavement down. He stops for a moment, pointing the hose away from her and toward the building, allowing her to walk past. They nod at one another. She can smell the water rising up from the concrete. Diana eyes the shop windows absentmindedly, turns down Frederick and then Harcourt, where grey-haired churchgoers are climbing out of brightly coloured hatchbacks beside the little church. This is stupid, she thinks. Where am I going to go now? She walks on, skirting Drummond Park, not knowing what to do. She passes a trio of Aboriginal women arguing quietly over a pack of cards beside the tennis courts. They wave at her for a cigarette. She hasn’t one. 15
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At the other end of the park there’s a public phone box. Diana heads for it and before she can stop herself, she’s loading the machine with one-dollar coins, and dialling with shaky fingers the number she knows off by heart. She listens as the phone rings, bleep-bleep, bleep-bleep, in tandem with her pulse. What will she say to him? How will she start? The coins land heavily in the bowels of the telephone as Harry’s answering machine switches on to take the call. Diana shuts her eyes. Please, let Nic be all right. Suddenly there’s the sound of Harry’s voice, all self-assured and cocky, and it almost makes her want to heave. ‘So do it man, say it … after the beep.’ Diana can hear the elongated beep blaring even as she places the handset back in its cradle. If he’s not home, he must be at the hospital with Nicole. Her stomach rumbles. She dashes to the public toilets, sits down on the hard china bowl — no seat cover — just in time for a sharp cramp and a rush of diarrhoea. She leans forward, lays her head against her knees, and lets it pass. Diana walks quickly now, making her way back along Linsley Street. People are looking at her and she can feel the town’s small grid starting to hem her in. Up toward the station, the State Rail bus is waiting, engine running and black diesel smoke billowing from the exhaust. She makes a run for it, can’t quite believe her luck. • • • 16
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It’s mid-afternoon when the bus stops at a tiny roadhouse three-quarters of the way to Wilcannia. The place is like a collection of tired old Monopoly houses, plonked down in the landscape and joined together with pieces of man-made junk that skirt the buildings in straggly fringes. A woman comes out of the little shop with a small suitcase. Diana notices the old stickers on the shopfront window advertising Chiko Rolls, Coke and Grandma’s Pies. There’s a handwritten sign stuck to the glass beside the doorway. KITCHENHAND NEEDED URGENTLY. GOOD WAGES. ACCOMMODATION PROVIDED.
Diana’s very first paid job was in a fast-food kitchen — well, at the Dagwood Dog stand at the Dubbo Show. She was thirteen. She’d turned up at the showground just as the showies’ vans began to stream in off the main road. She meandered through the vans and trucks and trailers and asked for casual work. People shook their heads or shrugged and said Go and see that bloke over there, love, he might be able to help you out. Imagine living like that, Diana thought, with these huge pink stuffed donkeys you have to hang up from hooks every time you set up. These huge pink polyester-filled donkeys you have to take down off hooks every time you move on. She ended up working for Teddy Smith’s family. She remembers Dagwood Dogs, fairy floss, the dirty caravan floor and how she would lean up against the counter, cursing the way the kebab carcass made the van hot. 17
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Thankfully, cutting the meat wasn’t part of her job. The boys did that. It was at the Dubbo Show that Diana was conned by Darren. He was Teddy Smith’s son. He wanted to have a race to see who could swallow a Dagwood Dog the fastest. ‘The winner gets five bucks.’ ‘We have to stand back-to-back otherwise we’ll crack up laughing at each other, I swear.’ Darren had three front teeth missing, two at the top and one along the bottom edge, off centre. They stood between the two vans, surrounded by a huddle of fold-up chairs and ashtrays and card tables. One tow bar faced the other, with a metre or two in between. You had to be careful not to bump your shins. Diana won the race. She turned around to discover Darren just standing there, his dog untouched, grease dripping down his wrist, his eyes sparkling. ‘Twenty-three seconds. Not bad. You win. But you’ll only see me money if you don’t throw up.’ Diana kept it all down, as proud as she could be, but she never saw Darren’s money anyway. She remembers how after two fourteen-hour days in the van she hadn’t given anybody the wrong change and Teddy’s wife Ruby asked her if she wanted to come to Condobolin with them. Diana couldn’t give Ruby a straight answer. She bowed her head, looking at the ground, at her feet, particularly at her shoelaces, thinking about her mum. Ruby smiled and winked. 18
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‘Never mind, girl. You’ll be right.’ Unlike his son, Teddy Smith paid up. Diana stashed the money she’d earned. She was saving it to move away some day, when the time was right. The show people were good, she reckoned, despite the bad rap they got from most people in town. She remembers how Teddy Smith’s whole family always smelt of kitchen fat. It was a comforting smell in a way, it was a smell you could dwell in.
From her seat behind the tinted glass window of the State Rail bus, Diana watches a man emerge from the roadhouse kitchen to say goodbye to the woman with the suitcase. The man is in his mid-forties, the beginnings of crow’s-feet forming around his smiling eyes as he leans with one hand against the stationary bus, talking with the driver. ‘Hey, listen, what’s your tip for Bathurst at the weekend?’ the driver wants to know. ‘Little Blue Lady, mate, a little filly off one of Charlie Bogan’s stallions. Race Seven.’ Diana smiles at the woman with the little suitcase, who has just climbed on board. The woman smiles back and there’s something about her smile that makes Diana do it. The driver is raising his hand — ‘See ya, mate’ — as the bus door hisses to a close and the brake is released, lurching the big vehicle forward. 19
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‘Hang on!’ Diana is on her feet, gravity pushing back at her as she makes her way toward the front of the bus. ‘Hey, driver. Can you hang on a minute?’ ‘What for?’ ‘I want to get off.’ ‘What?’ ‘I’m sorry, it’s just … there’s a sign up. I just saw it. Can you give me two minutes to see about a job?’ ‘Look, I haven’t really got time, love,’ the driver sighs, but brakes anyway and opens the door. ‘Hey, Bob,’ he calls out. Diana steps quickly down off the bus. ‘You after a new kitchenhand?’ the driver’s voice booms behind her. The man called Bob turns away from the petrol bowsers and walks back toward the bus, sizing up Diana. She notes the flecked grey-green eyes, the worry lines, his reddened face. ‘Yeah! God, yeah. You done this kind of work before?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘Where’d you come from?’ ‘Sydney.’ ‘Why’d you leave?’ ‘Time for a change.’ ‘I can understand that,’ he says, nodding thoughtfully. There’s a fly buzzing, settling, buzzing, around his hairline and Diana notices soft beads of sweat turning into a light stream above his ear. 20
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‘Please,’ she says, ‘I’m totally reliable.’ She glances back at the woman who has just got on the bus. Could it be this easy, Diana wonders, just to disappear? ‘Not much here,’ the roadhouse bloke is saying. ‘It’s a truck-stop, basically. Me sister’s been looking after the kitchen side of it for me,’ he nods toward the woman on the bus, ‘just since the last girl left. But she’s got her own place to get back to. What I need is someone who’ll stay for a bit.’ ‘Yeah?’ The bus driver has climbed down from his seat. ‘He’s all right, this bloke,’ he says to Diana, nodding at Bob. ‘He won’t give you any trouble. It’s a truckie’s joint, but,’ he warns. ‘The customers can be a bit rough around the edges.’ ‘They’re all right. They won’t hurt ya. Speak for yourself anyway, Joe.’ Now Bob’s sister has stepped off the bus. ‘Good on ya, darlin’, you lookin’ for work?’ She has a long face, slightly scarred from acne. Slender silver jewellery hangs from her ears. Diana is conscious of the whole bus full of passengers looking down at them. A scene is developing. ‘Listen,’ the woman with the earrings is saying, ‘it’d be great if you could give it a go. Bob here badly needs somebody. He’ll fix you up in the old homestead,’ she says, nodding toward a dusty old house beyond the parking area. ‘You can have the old house to yourself. Bob’s got his van.’ 21
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Diana looks around. They seem a bit too desperate and now she’s not sure if it’s such a good idea. The place is a mess of shapes. The restaurant and garage, all weatherboard and glass, fronts the expanse of carpark. Beside the main building is a toilet and shower block painted white. Further back there’s a circle of on-site vans, one of which looks lived in. The old house the woman nodded toward, its verandah sagging on all four sides, has a docile but friendly look about it. There are a few bales of hay along one side. A black and white kelpie sits in the shade by the front door, panting and smiling. Diana turns back to the group gathered around the front end of the bus. ‘It’s a start,’ she says hopefully. ‘Oh, good on ya, darlin’.’ ‘I’ll be back through this way tomorrow, anyway, love, if you change your mind. Just hang onto your ticket,’ says the driver, looking at his watch. ‘Better get a move on now, but. Got any luggage on?’ ‘No.’ Diana thinks she can detect a pause, a hesitation, in response to this answer, but nobody says anything. ‘Righto then, see ya, mate,’ says the driver, raising his hand at his friend and nodding at Bob’s sister to climb back on board. ‘Yeah, thanks, Joe.’ The bus door shuts with a hiss of air, the big engine humming smoothly as the vehicle edges away. 22
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‘Me name’s Bob,’ says the proprietor, as the bus shifts on to the road. ‘Bob Davies.’ Diana clears her throat in the hot dry air and waves hesitantly at the cloud of dust caused by the departing bus. ‘Diana,’ she says. ‘Diana Kooper.’
‘You take the chips out of the cool room and pour them into the basket, then dunk them in the oil. The timer goes off. Drain them. Rack them. Serve them.’ ‘Right.’ ‘With the hot dogs use the tongs. Out of the hot water. Buns are pre-buttered. Ask them what sauce they want. It’s tomato, barbecue, chilli or mustard.’ ‘Yep.’ ‘The pies. They’re all ready and sitting there in the warmer. Just keep an eye on them. If you need more, they’re in the cool room. Just make sure you don’t serve ’em cold or the customers’ll freak.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘And keep the drink fridges stocked up, too. All the bottles to the front. The Coke’s always gotta be at eye level. Don’t move the Cokes off that eye-level shelf or else the Coke rep will take the fridge away.’ ‘Right.’
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Inside the old homestead Diana has a mattress on the floor of the front room. But she can’t sleep. She tries not to picture Nicole’s body lying limp and broken in a hospital somewhere, or in a morgue. But the harder she tries to avoid it, the more the image haunts her. She lies on her left side, shifts to her right. She counts: two times two is four, four times two is eight, eight times two is sixteen … no. Forget it. The mattress is lumpy. The pillow is half empty of its stuffing. From two a.m. through to five, she checks her watch every half-hour, every twenty minutes, every ten. Sometimes it’s better not to close your eyes. When the dawn light starts to creep in, Diana feels overwhelmingly tired. Her breathing softens, her eyelids close. Too late. The kitchen opens early. She gets up, and moves about the old building like a hollow beast. One night, then the next, and the next. They are all the same. They are all one long darkness without rest. Thankfully, there is always food. Diana eats oranges and toasted cheese sandwiches made from frozen bread and plastic cheese. She drinks chocolate flavoured milk or creaming soda and watches boiled vegetables wilting in large troughs. She serves pies, pasties, sausage rolls, roast chicken. She feeds the leftovers to Bob’s dogs, especially Alice, the kelpie, who is at her heels whenever she steps outside. The worst smell Diana has ever encountered comes off the stock trucks. She wonders how the drivers cope, day in, day out. 24
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‘Burns out the nostril hairs, darling, I can tell you.’ One truck full of sheep arrives with a stillborn lamb hanging off the side of the top rack, a leg caught in the railing. It is bloody and covered in mucus, and the mother is bleating relentlessly. The driver takes down the carcass and throws it in the big steel bin to the side of the parking area. Wipes his hands on his jeans. ‘Just coffee and a pie, thanks, love.’ The roadhouse kitchen opens at five a.m. and closes at midnight. At the start, Bob ducks into the kitchen to check on her several times a day. He loiters a bit and tells a few lame jokes to whomever happens to be sitting in the dining area. ‘There’s this bloke in hospital, see, he’s had a road accident. He’s come in, he’s unconscious, and the nurses change him into his hospital garb, you know. Anyway, they notice he’s got this tattoo on his dick, right, it says “WOG”. Fair enough. He looks like a Croatian or something. They have a bit of a chuckle. So anyway, he’s there for a few days, he comes to and all that. Then there’s this new nurse that comes on board, and the Ward Sister says to her, “Look, first of all, you can give this bloke a shower,” right. So she’s a nice-looking nurse this new one, she’s a nice young one, and she gives this bloke a shower and when she’s finished one of the other nurses says to her, “Hey, did you see the tattoo on that guy’s dick?” and the young nurse says, “Yeah,” and the older one’s checkin’ up on her, see, so she says, “What did it say?” and the new nurse goes, “WOLLONGONG”!’ 25
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The drivers laugh with detachment, jiggling their bellies a little, or smirking sideways as they inhale on their ciggies. One of them gives off a shrill, wheezy chuckle that sounds like a diesel engine not quite firing. Diana doesn’t have the energy to laugh, but she feigns a smile. Somehow it feels safer to smile. Inside the little restaurant truckies congregate along the length of the orange laminex bar, coming and going at irregular intervals. Their conversation is scant, limited to short complaints and the occasional bad joke, which Bob immediately adds to his collection. Mouths never open all that wide. If Diana comes around the front of the bar to wipe the tables and mop the floor, she can see a whole row of boots twitching uneasily on the stool rests, knees flicking up and down, up and down, up and down. The drivers are nervous, preoccupied. This place is only ever some place on the way to somewhere else. Outside the truck engines tick and whirr and cool. There are b-doubles and semi-trailers and double road trains. There are Volvos and Macks, Western Stars and Kenworths. Some are brand-new, highly polished, sharply angled. Others are beaten-up, hand-painted, leaking oil. They are parked in haphazard lines, temporary alleyways running in between. One evening Bob leans on the kitchen counter while she prepares to close. Information is spilling from him, washing over her. ‘There’s a few tricks to keeping the trucks pulling up, 26
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see. First thing is you put the petrol up a few cents on anyone else within a few hundred Ks. It discourages the tourists.’ ‘Oh?’ ‘Look, the tourists are okay, but they’re fussy. You’re better off without them. So you keep the price of standard petrol right up and the price of diesel right down. Discount a few cents a litre for fellas that fill up — just the regular spenders. Second thing is the food. You serve it fast. You serve it simple. You make sure if ever there’s a tourist in the joint, you don’t bring them their food until every truckie in the place has eaten. The drivers don’t like to wait, see. A few other little things: you keep the shower block always open and free and you clean it pretty good; you take orders over the radios; you stay open every day; you stay open late. People are counting on you, you know? That’s the worst part.’ ‘Uh huh,’ Diana says disinterestedly. Bob pulls the black plastic comb out of his top pocket and combs back his hair. ‘Geez, love, if you knew the sweat and tears I’d put into this place over the years it’d break your heart.’
The State Rail bus heads west one day, east the next. Bob’s place is not a scheduled stop. When she isn’t working in the kitchen, Diana wanders up and down along the edge of the carpark and out along the road, stretching her knuckles, 27
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looking out at the line of the horizon. Something, an emptiness, has got under her skin. She hasn’t had a beer, a smoke of weed, a single pill, she hasn’t had anything since she left the city. The world looks different from here. She is wondering who it was she used to be back there in Sydney, and whether it is the same person who walks along the roadside now. To the west of the petrol bowsers, where the carpark becomes dirt, there are seven scraggly trees sheltering the small group of on-site vans. Bob’s van has an annexe and one of his many dogs sits in its shade amidst a mess of fold-up chairs and card tables. A rusty airconditioning unit drips coloured water onto the dust. Further back from the old homestead is a big grey shed spilling car bodies, engine parts and disused oil containers. Surrounding the shed are other rusty corrugated shanties, some housing dogs, others housing more corrugated iron. It’s a strange settlement; more of a lack of settlement. But there’s something endearing about its fragility in the face of the great expanse of flat land all around. The only other sign of human habitation is the road itself. The homestead building is a dusty old place, the walls and ceilings marked with holes and dry rot. For the whole of the first week here, Diana has kept a small iron bar within an arm’s reach of her bed. It takes her some time to adjust to the night sounds (truck engines, cab doors shutting, the occasional thump of a roo). Sometimes a vehicle seems to pull up to Bob’s van in the middle of the night. One night 28
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she stands at the window and witnesses a woman in a short red skirt knocking on his cabin door. The door opens and the woman goes in. Diana smiles to herself. A prostitute, she thinks. Gradually, she manages to sleep. In the mornings the light shines into the room through cobwebs, making patterns on the wall. Diana resolves to shake out the old moth-eaten floor rugs, to lift the mattress up onto upturned milk crates, lay fresh baits and traps for the mice and rats in the back kitchen and clean out the woodstove. In the second bedroom she has discovered a wardrobe full of vintage clothes and naphthalene: floral dresses with oversized buttons, cotton drill work shirts and denim, denim, denim. She takes to wearing these stranger’s clothes. There’s something she is beginning to like about the job, the place. New people. New patterns. Learning to be someone. And here in the roadhouse kitchen, there’s always someone turning up. ‘You like tomato relish, love?’ says Con Sweet F.A., putting a jar up on the counter with a handwritten label: B & G SMITH, LUCKNOW. ‘Sure do.’ Con is a regular fixture at the counter. He always has something printed on the front of his shirt. His favourite is ‘Sweet F.A.’ and there’s another which just says ‘Fuck’ but the lettering is designed in imitation of the Ford logo and you don’t notice what it actually says at first. Diana’s personal favourite so far is ‘Caution: Bum Steer’. 29
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There is always plenty of work. Drain them, rack them, serve them. And people speak in the same way she speaks. There’s nothing Sydney about them.
One day Nicole’s cousin, Milo, comes through. He nods at her, says nothing. Does he know? Diana turns her back to him to stack the fridges while Milo eats his pie and chips down the other end of the restaurant. Her memory of City Road has lain dormant for several days and nights, the collision’s echo barely audible beneath the mindless repetition of kitchen work. Now it’s back again with force. And Nicole’s pitiful face, the night before the accident. ‘You’ve gotta help me, Di.’ When Milo’s finished his pie, he makes a point of pausing as he passes her on his way out. ‘How’s it goin’?’ he mumbles. Diana nods, her hand against a warm can of coke. ‘Yeah, good.’ And that’s it. He’s gone. But she will lie awake again tonight because of him.
Toward the end of her first fortnight at the roadhouse, Diana notices Bob gazing in the direction of the highway a little too regularly. He has the racing lift-out tucked under his arm as he circles back from workshop to front 30
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window, restless, like a dog unable to find a decent place to lie down. Eventually he leans across the counter, one hand jingling the keys in his pocket. He looks her in the eye, squints a little, just to signal he’s serious. ‘Listen, you can look after things here for a few hours, can’t you, mate?’ ‘I guess.’ ‘Right, well I’m just going to pop into town.’ And then he drives away. Diana is alone. She serves the drivers, wipes the benchtops, cleans the grill. People are coming and going, and they don’t seem to have noticed, but she’s fully aware of it. She’s alone here in the middle of nowhere. The boss has left her to it. The first thing that occurs to her is that she could take all the money out of the till, and just piss off. She smiles for a moment at the picture of this, notes falling out of her pockets as she climbs up into the front seat of a rig and hitches away. It probably wouldn’t be worth the effort, though. She rings up a fake sale to open the register drawer and count the takings. Four hundred dollars. It wouldn’t last two weeks. She voids the sale, closes the drawer. ‘D’ya hear they’re talking about putting in bloody cameras, mate, on all the major routes into the capital cities. Checking no bastard does more than fourteen hours in every twenty-four,’ one of the drivers is complaining to the guy beside him. 31
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‘Oh, wouldn’t surprise me, mate, bloody Big Brother, eh?’ ‘Yeah, you’re not wrong.’ Diana takes the radio from Bob’s office and puts it beside the register, switching it on. The only music she can find on the dial is nostalgic stuff, old jazz. Well I went down the St James’ infirmary, a man is singing, deep and slow, saw my baby there stretched out on a long white table so sweet, so cold, so fair. ‘Pretty bloody depressing song,’ says one of the blokes at the bar, over the top of his Who Weekly. ‘I reckon.’ She switches it off.
When the customers thin out Diana writes up the weekly light meals on the blackboard: Open Season Rissole with tomato, onion, grilled cheese, side salad $7.50 Chicken or Beef Schnitzel Long roll with lettuce, mayo, cheese or coleslaw $5.50 Steak Diane with baked pumpkin, carrot and potato $8.50 32
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then sits down with a cigarette. From the rear door of the kitchen, she watches a flock of galahs making a noisy racket and dancing around the water tank near the old homestead. It’s late afternoon, the sun almost weak enough to look at. The birds are going crazy; squabbling, calling, hanging upside down from diagonal stretches of steel and bouncing themselves up and down. They’re supposed to be really stupid, those birds, but they look like they’re having a ball. Imagine if that was all you had to do to get by. Just behave like an idiot; cause a racket; swing upside down from a pipe. Diana hears tyres on the gravel and sighs as she watches a young bloke edge his b-double gently around the back of the shop, parking in the dirt. He sits there for a minute, shutting his eyes, rubbing the back of his neck before climbing down. Must be pulling in for the night, parking right back from the road like that. His feet hit the dust with a dull thud. She is back at the grill when the front screen door flaps and crashes and the newcomer walks in. He has on a bright yellow shirt, lightly smeared with dust, a smiley face printed in black on the front of it. He is tall and bright-eyed. There’s a light spray of freckles across his nose. ‘G’day.’ He looks across at her. ‘G’day.’ She looks across at him. 33
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‘I like your shirt,’ she teases, recognising the danceparty icon for ecstasy. The young guy shrugs his shoulders. Her picture of him is perfectly framed by the stuffed polyester emus and rock art tea towels hanging from faded tinsel along the window frame behind him. ‘Where’d you get it?’ He shrugs again. He has such round, full lips. Dark eyes. ‘Sydney.’ Diana clears her throat. She grins at him. ‘You want to order something?’ ‘What have you got?’ She raises her eyebrows and gestures toward the blackboard above her head. ‘Depends how hungry you are.’ Two flies crash up against the insect zapper. Fizz, fizz. She finds herself watching, carefully, the corners of the young man’s mouth. ‘I used to live on King Steet,’ she says, ‘up toward City Road, just near the Eveleigh Railway workshops. You know where I mean?’ ‘Sure, I had some friends live around there for a while.’ ‘Did you live near there?’ ‘No, I um, no, I lived mostly down the southern suburbs, Sutherland, later, kind of near Hurstville, you know Blakehurst?’ He crosses his arms in front of his chest, lifting the sleeve of his T-shirt absentmindedly as he scratches an itch on his upper arm. Her eyes rest on the muscularity of his 34
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torso, tight and solid beneath his shirt. She swallows and looks away. ‘Nah, I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I forget how big Sydney is sometimes … Do you want to … Can I get you anything … ?’ The newcomer doesn’t answer for a moment. Diana is thinking how irrelevant their conversation is. There is just the way he looks at her. And the way she looks back at him. She wipes the counter top down, distractedly, and washes and dries her hands, smiling to herself. ‘The boss is away in town,’ she says. And soon there’s a vague sense of time falling away, a kind of downhill glide. Within ten minutes she has shut the door to the restaurant and spun the red and white sign around: CLOSED
‘What’s your name, anyway?’ she says. ‘Andy. Andy West.’ Then Andy West is kissing her up against the Coke fridge, his leg between her thighs, her tongue deep inside his mouth. Internally, Diana is laughing at the absurdity of it, even as she is carried away by the moment. This kind of thing has never happened to her before. It’s something Nicole Clarke would do, perhaps. But not Diana Kooper. Not in broad daylight. She lifts Andy West’s yellow T-shirt clean off his back and drops it in a heap on the restaurant floor. He has not a single tattoo. One of his nipples is 35
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pierced. She runs her hands along his back, and draws his body close, breathing him in. ‘Do you want to come with me back to the house?’ ‘Absolutely.’
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2 t’s dark and the roadhouse kitchen remains shut. Occasionally there is the sound of a rig’s air brakes as the driver slows down, draws into the parking area, then drives away. Diana watches the headlights dance against the wall of her room. At first Andy West smells like a mixture of sweat and motor oil, but later he takes on the scent of Cooper’s Pale Ale, gunja and fresh oranges. Everything they’ve consumed. ‘I learnt to drive C Class on the Wollongong to Penrith route with a bloke called Gazza sitting beside me. Gazza’s a real fat man. He carries a packed lunch box everywhere he goes. He taught me nothing about driving rigs. I couldn’t remember all the regulations about load restraint. Twice we nearly lost the load on the Appin Road. Gazza never answered my questions. He talked over the top of near accidents about how much his father had weighed when he died, about how much his mother weighed, about how
I
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everybody in the history of his family was immensely obese. Always have been fat fuckin’ bastards, we have.’ She smiles. ‘Always have been,’ he says again, leaning back on her makeshift bed. She and Andy share another of his joints and soon she can taste the weed in his mouth. Their faces greet through touch, their noses knocking. She rocks and tenses against his push and hears herself gasping close against his neck. Andy moves carefully, proudly, breathes quietly. The mattress creaks beneath them. Later he’s asleep. Diana sits up and leans against the wall. She closes her eyes and can feel Andy West’s semen running out of her, forming a wet patch on the sheet. It feels good. She is high on the shock of good sex. Last time she fucked someone they were both drunk. It was one of Harry’s friends. They did it in the upstairs bedroom of a stranger’s house, a party going on beneath, and the guy pumped away at her indifferently. It was sad and mechanical and over too quickly. She could still smell the rubbery chemical scent of the condom on her fingers when she went back downstairs to join the others. That was months ago now. She studies Andy West’s sleeping body and discovers a scar that cuts across his lower back in a diagonal line. It’s a row of capital letter ‘T’s linked head to tail, head to tail, and slightly raised, as if embossed. She traces it with her 38
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forefinger and notices how the road has gone all quiet. The lights are out, and there’s still no sign of Bob. Hours later, it starts to rain and Diana hears soft drops of water against the tin roof of the old homestead. What a strange and beautiful sound, something she hasn’t listened to properly, peacefully, for years. Behind the main pattern there is something else: the water queueing on the roof of the house and dropping, dropping, dropping at forced intervals. A faint, disorganised musicality. She goes to sleep. And then Andy wakes her. ‘It’s raining.’ ‘I know.’ He’s getting up. It’s still so early. ‘Are you asleep?’ And she says yes and he leaves.
When Diana wakes again the sky is the colour of dull metal. She gets up to go to the toilet, stale sweat damp on her skin. Sheets have imprinted her side and a rash has developed on her forearm. It’s a heat rash. Andy West’s truck is gone. The morning air smells deliciously soft. Diana is delirious with the fragile touch of intimacy still fresh in her memory. She hopes she’ll see him again. When she dresses and re-opens the restaurant, the clock in the dining room says twenty past five. On the 39
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windowsill near the back sink there is a scatter of small marks. She has to look closely to see whether they are wings or leaves. Wings, she decides. Strange insects, appearing and disappearing with the rain, like fish in dry creek beds.
It’s afternoon by the time Bob climbs out of his HQ Belmont. He has a definite bounce in his step. The restaurant doors crash and snap behind him and his voice is loud and high. ‘Little Blue Lady!’ ‘What?’ ‘Little Blue Lady! Twelve to fuckin’ one at Eagle Farm. Twelve to fuckin’ one.’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘You fuckin’ bet!’ ‘Oh, good one, boss!’ ‘How’s things, kid? You were all right here on your own, weren’t you, mate?’ ‘Yeah ...’ ‘Look, it was a long shift, I know. I’ll give you a nice bonus, all right?’ he says. ‘Oh, it’s okay,’ she shrugs, smiling. ‘What’s up?’ ‘Hey?’ ‘What’s with the smile?’ ‘Ah, nothin’.’ 40
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‘Nah, it’s good. It’s good to see. You should do it more often.’
Maybe she’s feeling guilty. Later in the evening, Diana finds herself leaning against the back door of the kitchen, having a cigarette and making conversation with Bob. ‘So what did you do in town, after your big win?’ she asks. ‘Have you got a nice lady friend in Cobar?’ ‘Nah, just got shit-faced at the pub, lost half me winnings in the next fuckin’ race anyhow. Tell you the truth, Di, I don’t have much to do with nice women any more.’ ‘Oh?’ ‘I’ve been married twice, both times it didn’t work out. But maybe I’m a difficult bastard, I don’t know. I do like to have a punt. Women, they don’t like the ups and downs. They’d rather just flatline the whole way and I get crazy in that kind of situation, you know, it hems you in. I’ve never been a Mr Average, have 2.5 kids and live in the suburbs kind of bloke.’ ‘I can understand that.’ There is a moment’s silence and Diana feels suddenly awkward, wishing she hadn’t brought up the topic. She watches Bob’s body language for any hint that he’s misunderstood her, but he seems laid-back, unconcerned, and she is relieved. They watch a group of rabbits scurrying in the light 41
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spilling from the kitchen a short distance away, chomping on the little bit of green weed fed by a leaky tap. ‘Not frightened of us, hey?’ ‘Nah. Too bloody dumb, those animals.’ Bob pokes his head back into the kitchen momentarily to wave to one of the truckies leaving the dining area. ‘See ya, Maurie.’ ‘See ya, mate.’ ‘You know, Di, takin’ a punt on the gallops, it’s got a bad reputation. It’s true that a lot of punters out there wouldn’t know a fetlock from a dreadlock. But bettin’ on the horses,’ Bob pauses, ‘it takes a certain amount of skill. Forget all these poor bastards in the city who front up to the card machines and the Keno and all that, all the big clubs and casinos. Now that is a mug’s game. The house is never gonna lose. You might come good once or twice, but in the long run, you’re always gonna be on the back foot.’ Diana nods. ‘Now the horses is different,’ he reckons. ‘You’ve just gotta do your homework and be a little bit clever about how you make use of the information. You’ve gotta have a bit of discipline. That’s what I like about it out here at the roadhouse — you’ve got nothin’ much else to do, you can sit down and watch the replays, analyse the stats, get your teeth stuck into it before you go and make your bet. That’s what I do in me little office there, see? Then all I’m really doin’ when I put me money down is I’m pittin’ my judgement against the opinion of the general public, right, 42
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against a bunch of poor bastards, the majority of whom don’t know a fuckin’ thing about the sport of kings.’ The dogs over by the shed start to make a racket, pulling at their chains. Diana watches the rabbits flee, their soft shapes receding into the blank open space of night. Bob’s all right, for a boss.
At the roadhouse counter she learns all about securing the load: turnbuckles, wrench-binders, load binder chain, winches, webbing, the truckie’s hitch (double shank, double hitch), sheepshank, single sheet bend, double clove hitch, timber hitch, towing hitch. Working here is like sitting back and watching the whole of Australia being moved slowly past your front door. The transport of cars, cattle crates, uranium yellowcake, prefabricated steel, plastics, concrete pipe, explosives, coal, wool. The trickle of people — hitchhikers and sales reps and drivers — moving from state to state. Imagine the arcs the regular drivers complete across the same stretches of land every third or fourth day. Diana can picture their dreams, suspended on a ghost line like insects on a barely visible web, their bodies always on the way to somewhere else. All these drivers, just keeping at it, just working on. The next moment carries with it the promise of another. There is always somewhere else to arrive at. • • • 43
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One afternoon a cop car pulls up close to the front of the building as Diana hands a bucket of chips across the counter. She must have been raising her eyebrows at the two young coppers getting out and donning their caps, because the guy she is serving turns around and watches them too. ‘Here’s trouble,’ the driver says, picking up his chips and his loose change and shifting away from the counter. The coppers walk with their arms slightly away from their bodies to avoid the paraphernalia attached to their belts (guns, pouches, rods). The effect is to give them both a slight lean forward, their arms dangling, ape-like. ‘G’day.’ ‘Hi.’ They’re young. One of them looks only two or three years older than Diana, the other slightly older, but not much. ‘Youse right?’ ‘Oh, just after a bit of a feed.’ ‘Right.’ Two Cokes, chips, two pies, a Chiko Roll. The whole transaction is almost complete and Diana is handing across the change when the older copper tilts his head at her, squinting a little. ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ ‘Dunno. Don’t think so.’ He sighs, his left hand hovering above the food he’s about to pick up off the counter. ‘Hang on a minute.’ 44
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Diana gives him her best innocent face. ‘There was a picture of you up in our station a few years back. Up on the Missing Person’s board. You and another kid. Youse were what, only thirteen, fourteen? You remember it, Derek?’ he says, looking across at the younger man. ‘Nah, when was this? I’ve only been at Cobar twelve months.’ ‘You were from Nyngan, hey, the two of youse?’ She shrugs, biting her lower lip. ‘Oh well, youse must have come good, ’cos the posters went down. It’s just that I remember your face,’ he says, inspecting her. ‘You’ve got this look about you, sort of, I don’t know.’ Diana looks blankly out at their patrol car. ‘How long you been working here for?’ he persists. ‘Long enough.’ ‘Right,’ he says, picking up his food. ‘Come on, Jezz, we’d better get a move on, hey?’ says the other one, smiling at Diana (unnecessarily, she thinks). ‘Yeah, righto. See ya next time, hey?’ And the door swings open and shut.
They had been missing, all right. The girls’ first trip to Sydney was in the back of a twodoor Mitsubishi Lancer that young Mick Connolly was taking to give to his father’s sister in exchange for a new Ford Fairmont. Mick Connolly’s auntie was married to a car dealer 45
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who lived in a three-storey home overlooking the Pittwater end of Newport. Mick was going to drive there, stay one night, swap cars, drive home. He picked the girls up at the river. It sounded like a good idea. A bit of an adventure. They ate salt and vinegar Smiths in the back as Mick unwound the Lancer and overtook truck after truck in a flash of quick noise. He pushed it to a hundred and eighty between Bathurst and Portland–Wallerawang, and practised weaving through the traffic on the new patchwork pieces of the multi-lane highway being sewn between Penrith and the city. It was late afternoon when they reached the northern beaches, the girls mesmerised by the rows of mansions and the humming of sports cars. As they approached Pittwater a rich pattern of sailing vessels came into view, buoyant on the clear blue water. Mick pulled into the steep driveway of a tall narrow residence. His relatives weren’t home. The three of them spent the night delirious in the big empty house, drinking champagne from the overstocked fridge and eating cashews and macadamias which they threw into the air, competing to see whose open mouth could catch them. Diana danced around the airconditioned lounge room until she broke into a sweat. They got Nicole’s Madonna tape out of the car and pumped up Mick’s uncle’s stereo, miming to ‘Like a Prayer’ and facing the natural amphitheatre of the bay which shone with small boat lights as the darkness descended. Later Diana vomited on the champagne-coloured carpet and fell asleep in one of the children’s bunks, stirring now and then to hear Mick 46
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Connolly trying to get hold of Nicole on his auntie’s bed. ‘Come on, gorgeous, don’t muck around.’ ‘Piss off, Mick.’ ‘Come on, babe, don’t do this to me.’ ‘Eeuggh, yuck!’ ‘Oh, how’s that, eh? Is that all right? Hey?’
The next day, Mick went back without them. The girls went in to the city and sat on the Town Hall steps, openeyed, as they watched the people go by. ‘You’re lucky you don’t have big tits,’ said Nicole. ‘Why’s that?’ ‘You get tits like mine, everyone comes after ya. Me uncles. Me cousins. Dickheads like Mick Connolly. Peter O’Toole.’ They watched a woman with a green mohawk running for a bus, hundreds of safety pins on her leather jacket rattling and rustling as she went. ‘It’s pretty excellent here, hey?’ ‘Yeah. I don’t know if I want to go back to Nyngan.’ ‘Me either.’ Diana thought of her mum, the vomit stuck to the front of her dressing-gown. How long would it take, she wondered, until her mum realised she was gone?
From her position behind the till, looking out toward the carpark, Diana immediately recognises Bob’s sister climbing 47
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down out of a rig, stubbie in hand. She looks different from that day Diana got off the bus; less tired, perhaps. But the smile is the same. It’s the smile of someone who has been a mother to her children. It’s a comforting smile. ‘How’s it goin’?’ ‘Pretty good.’ ‘Oh, see, I knew you’d be right.’ Nola and her husband Charlie take up what looks to be their regular spot at the back door of the kitchen, smoking and yarning with Bob. ‘That bastard Mason undercuts us every time, Bob. No one could survive on the quotes he gives, eh. They think they can, but they can’t.’ ‘Nah, he’s all right, Nola. I’ve known him for years.’ Diana notices how Nola and Bob have the same fine limp hair, his brown, hers red. Apart from this, they don’t look at all alike. ‘That’s not the point, Charlie. He’d just as soon stab you in the back.’ Nola and Charlie’s load was due somewhere yesterday. They sit here anyway. Every time Diana looks at her, Nola has something in her mouth. Cigarette. Bong. Stubbie. Diana hasn’t so far witnessed her actually eating anything. Nola’s clairvoyant, she reckons, says that she can see some woman walking in Diana’s shadow, following her around the kitchen as she bends to wipe down the benches or rack the chips. 48
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‘She’s really checking up on you all the time, this woman, right on your back. She’s not tryin’ to frighten you but, I reckon. She’s looking at you as though you’re something precious to her — it’s good shit that, eh, that’s Graeme Wilson’s crop.’ Diana scrapes cool fat off the commercial grill, piling it into a homemade billy hanging off one of the dials at the front. She looks directly at Nola. ‘So, she’s dead then, this woman? Is she dead?’ Nola pauses, contemplating her stubbie of VB. She peels the top corner of the label off then smooths it down. ‘Nola?’ But Nola’s looking the other way, joining in on Charlie’s conversation with Bob, as if the information she’d just given Diana was neither here nor there. ‘I swear, you spend three days on the road, Charlie, and you’re lucky to be ahead a hundred bucks. You just shouldn’t work for him. He’s an arsehole.’ ‘Yeah, but I was stranded in Perth, Nola. For fuck’s sake. I had to get a load home from somewhere. I’m losing fifty dollars for every day the rig’s off the road, sweetheart.’ ‘Nola, is she dead?’ Diana pleads. ‘Well, what do ya reckon, darlin’. She wouldn’t be a ghost if she wasn’t.’
The girls stayed in a cheap hotel in Pitt Street while the balance in Diana’s school bank book plummetted toward 49
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zero. The place was good while it lasted. Their room was tiny, with just enough space for the double bed and a small wardrobe with a cracked mirror. They were given food vouchers for Woolworths by the Salvation Army and spent hours queueing in Social Security, filling in forms, queueing again. There were short-lived jobs delivering pamphlets or trying to sell stuff over the phone. When one of the girls was working things could be good. They went to see live bands and forged ID got them into pubs as far away as Cronulla and Mosman. Or they hung around in alternative record shops in the city, eyeing off the other customers: goths and punks and paisley-shirted boys in black jeans; chicks with groovy sunnies and op-shop dresses. They listened to them talking; watched mannerisms; imitated. It was winter in Sydney, and in the early hours of the morning, especially on cold nights, Nicole’s breathing was loud with mucus and she snored and spluttered, interrupting Diana’s thin sleep. Sometimes her arms swung out and hit Diana’s head or chest. All they had were two thin blankets. Sometimes they fought for these and in the morning woke to find neither body covered, the blankets in a pink and grey mound at the foot of the mattress. After this they started sleeping in their jackets and piling every other leftover piece of clothing from around the room on top of the blankets to weigh them down. One afternoon Diana’s urine was pink. At first she thought of her period, but the timing was wrong. Anyway, 50
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the blood was coming from somewhere else, her bladder maybe, her stomach, she didn’t know where. Her whole body ached. Nicole was working on a paper stand outside St James station. Diana curled up on the shared mattress, clutching her abdomen. She went to the toilet again and watched the water darken. She wanted to cry, but couldn’t. She closed the door to their room and felt her face screw up, letting a small moan escape into her pillow. For the next three hours she traipsed up and back to the women’s toilets at the end of the hall, urgently needing to wee and then finding nothing left, just this sharp burning pain and drops of watery blood. Finally she sat miserably on the toilet seat, giving up going back to the room at all. She sat and sat, the pain burning. Once or twice someone else entered the Women’s and she sensed a shadow hovering, peering through the cracks at her. It was a man’s shape. ‘Fuck off!’ she yelled, and the shadow disappeared. Nicole came back, finally, with a whole take-away chicken and some chips. She was happy, singing, like she was bursting, like everything was great. ‘Guess what? I’ve still got fifteen dollars left, Di.’ By then, Diana was a ball on the floor of their room. ‘Nic, I’m pissing blood.’ ‘Oh, shit.’ She felt like a rock, like she couldn’t stand up, not even to go back down the hall to the toilet. Nicole wanted to take her to the doctor but Diana wouldn’t budge. So Nic spent an hour sitting beside the crouched form, stroking 51
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Diana’s hair as she wrote down her symptoms on a scrap of paper. Then she left for the twenty-four hour medical centre on Broadway. Nicole feigned the symptoms herself to the Indian doctor. She pissed in a canister for him (the clarity of her urine raising the doctor’s eyebrows slightly) and came back with antibiotics, Ural and three litres of apple juice, her fifteen dollars gone. ‘He reckons it’s a urinary tract infection, Di. Some people get them all the time, he said.’ ‘What from?’ ‘I don’t know. He said, “Have you swapped partners recently?” Like that,’ she lowered her chin to her chest and furrowed her eyebrows. ‘And then he goes, “When you defecate, always wipe front to back, not back to front.” ’ ‘Front to back, not back to front.’ They laughed at the imitation, Diana clutching at her abdomen.
At Bob’s place the weeks fall away. Diana has Tuesdays and half of Wednesday off and Andy West pulls up once a week like clockwork. A few days before Christmas she spends most of the Tuesday morning watching the road for Andy’s truck. She circles from homestead to bowsers, looking east. He’s late. There’s a dull ache in her abdomen from the fear that he won’t come at all and she thinks that she couldn’t bear not seeing him. Her whole body needs him. But then, sure enough, he pulls up. 52
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‘I’m running late,’ he says. ‘I know.’ ‘I’m overdue for Port Augusta. I can’t really afford to stop.’ Diana shrugs her shoulders. ‘Then I’ll come with you,’ she says, and soon afterwards she’s in the seat beside him, the blue metallic Western Star glistening in the western sun as the road unfolds beneath them. ‘Pull over, babe,’ she’s saying, little more than an hour down the road. ‘Let’s have some fun.’ ‘I can’t, Di. I’m running late as it is.’ For the first few hundred Ks, Andy keeps turning the stereo down and she keeps turning it back up. ‘What?’ ‘I can’t hear you.’ ‘What?’ Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, the truck blows a second rear tyre and Andy swears and curses and pulls up. Diana steps down from the cab to piss amidst the spinifex — there’s not much chance for privacy. When another rig rattles past and she’s still pulling up her pants, she abandons pride and turns around to moon the passing driver. The rig’s horn blows loud in appreciation. ‘Ha! Did ya see that?’ Andy has his head bent down, kneeling beside the tyre. His hands are black. He’s smeared grease on his face. ‘Andy?’ 53
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‘Fuckin’ cunt of a thing.’ He’s squatting and scrubbing at his hands with sand, a mangled block of Solvol and a bit of water from one of the containers under the truck. ‘Did ya see that?’ ‘What?’ ‘Oh, doesn’t matter,’ she smirks. ‘Nothing special.’ The spinifex is a yellow blanket edging their ride as they pick up speed. Hours later the soft curves of hills begin and the snaking creeks see them through the Flinders Ranges. They deliver the load to a warehouse at the edge of a sparse flat harbour, ringed with salt. ‘Port Disgusting.’ ‘Augusta.’ ‘Disgusting.’ They turn back the way they’ve come. Someone has abandoned a bright yellow thermos on a picnic table near Hancock’s Lookout. Outside Oodla Wirra, a wedge-tailed eagle perches at the side of the road and Diana thinks it’s a large dog at first. Later she is mesmerised by the landscape moving quickly past them. Her gaze shifts from a lonely tree to a vast slope of hill to a grey-blue bloom of granite sprouting from a small rise. She leans with her back against the passenger door and looks out Andy’s window, periodically shifting her focus back to his face, then out to the land, then back to his face. Later, at the back of one of the two pubs in a two-pub town, the truck is pulled up amongst others in an untidy 54
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line. It’s dusk and Diana and Andy are on top of each other on the thin mattress behind the seats. She’s feeling the smooth beautiful skin of his cock with her fingers and tongue. He’s sighing into the faded red pillow that, along with a torn sheet and an old paisley sleeping bag, makes up the linen on his cabin bed. She starts to gently suck and tug, trying to keep her lips wrapped around him tightly and pulling firmly without hurting. She keeps one hand at the base of his cock and the other moves up and down with her mouth. She’s dribbling on him, making him wet. He starts to move in rhythm with her work. They get faster. And faster still. She’s thinking how she’s never enjoyed doing this to a man so much before. She begins to ache. And then as she stops moving back and forth to lap quickly with her tongue at the tip of his foreskin, she feels the creamy white sweetness come from him and holds it in her mouth for a moment, then releases it. She licks the stickiness slowly off him, feeling again the wonderful smooth tautness of his skin there, the soft, bitter taste of him. Andy sits up and latches his arms around her torso, resting his face in the light hollow of space beneath her shoulder. They sit there like this in the carpark for a long while. Diana can hear drivers slamming cab doors or calling out g’days or seeya, mates to each other. She runs her fingers through his hair and when she gently raises his face to hers to look at him, she sees that his eyes are wet with emotion. Afterwards, inside the pub, they play pool and lean against the bar, getting to know the half-dozen strangers 55
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who lurch and sneer and spin yarns into the early hours. One of the blokes turns out to be a pool shark and they lose twenty dollars to him. Another guy reckons he’s getting married the coming Saturday and invites them to his wedding. It’s eight hundred Ks out of their way. ‘I can’t wait to marry her, eh. She’s fucking lovely.’ They eat hot chips on slabs of soft white bread smothered in vinegar and salt and sauce. Eventually the barman calls last drinks. At three a.m. they return to the carpark and Diana leans over to vomit on the tyre of a dusty white truck. Too much Toohey’s Old. Andy rubs her back, then steers her with a hand on each buttock and helps her up into their cab. He sets her up on the mattress behind the seat, passes her a bottle of water and settles himself to sleep upright in the driver’s seat. At dawn the truck is back on the highway and Andy is singing along with the stereo. He’s right out of tune. When they stop for roadside coffee, Diana watches from the cab as two teenage girls in short skirts and tall boots bludge cigarettes from a driver outside the rest area’s toilets. They carry backpacks that look like school bags. One leans against the building with a leg bent slightly to show off her long thighs. She laughs at something the driver says and Diana hears, Yeah, all right, you’re on, wondering what trouble the girls are in. She finds herself oddly jealous of them. She remembers the way a hint of risk used to warm her up inside, the way she and Nic were always ready to egg each other on, topping every dare with something 56
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louder, worse, more stupid. It was as if nothing could ever get the better of either of them. Nothing.
After a few months in the city, some old bloke staying at the same hotel lined the girls up with short-term jobs on a sixty-foot fishing trawler off the coast of Ulladulla. ‘Go on,’ the old fisherman reckoned. ‘Go and get some wind into your sails.’ They travelled south on the coastal train, watching the swelling green ocean disappear and re-appear in between tunnels, old stations, and strips of houses. When they got to the port at Ulladulla they smelt the salt air and watched eagerly as the rows of fishing vessels bobbed with the tide. The skipper was rough-skinned and matter of fact. ‘There’s eleven of youse all up,’ he said. ‘The others are all blokes, but.’ The girls glanced at one another. ‘No worries.’ For the first few days out to sea, they stayed close together. There were jokes about women and boats and luck. But soon there were record catches. Twelve tuna all up. One of them weighed two hundred and eighty pounds. It was that big they had to cut off its head to fit it in the cool room. ‘Bringing us luck, all right — twelve thousand dollars’ worth,’ one of the fellas finally conceded. 57
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During the second week, Diana pulled in a thirty-kilo fish on her own. She could hardly believe it. She got it up on board, shot it and collapsed on the deck beside it. The crew laughed about that for the rest of the trip. This is the way to live, the girls decided. Some days they had little to do. Most days they’d just put out the nets, leave them for four to six hours, then pull them in again. It was heavy physical work, but there was so much sun, and the men gave them so much shit that the girls learned to give it back double. They laughed enough to build the muscles in their abdomens, as much as they were building the muscles in their upper arms and shoulders. Down in the galley while the nets were out, the blokes played cards or watched football videos, arguing over the wisdom of various tactics in a given match. Rotto and Sonny, two of the younger ones, figured they were in with a chance, and sat close to Nic and Diana, sharing cigarettes and giving advice on poker. One Saturday Slim put a porn video into the machine and sat back, rolling his tobacco with a sly grin. The girls were playing twenty-one at the time, and Diana did her best not to look up, though occasionally the close-ups drew her attention. She’d never seen human anatomy from quite that angle, not during the act, anyway. Some of the other blokes were clearly uncomfortable about the situation, clearing their throats or moving back up on to the deck. But Sonny and Rotto, sitting right across the table from the girls, couldn’t believe their luck. Rotto kept 58
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raising his eyebrows at his mate, and trying to hold back a chuckle. Maybe it was an arranged manoeuvre — Diana couldn’t be sure. Nicole was less discreet. ‘Jesus, look at the size of this bloke,’ she said, laying down her hand at cards. ‘I’m out.’ An odd hush descended after a while, and Diana shifted her gaze between the television and the faces watching it. On screen, a blond American surfer was getting his cock sucked by one woman, while burying his face in the crotch of another. The soundtrack was laughable, but in the tiny galley, half a dozen faces were suddenly devoid of humour. Across the little table from her Sonny was shifting in his seat, and soon she felt his hand under the table, stroking her knee, followed a few minutes later by a bootless foot against her groin. Glancing across at Rotto, she guessed that Nicole, too, was getting some kind of under-the-table treatment. Nicole, in fact, was looking furtive. Diana recognised the look. It was a kind of challenge. ‘Christ,’ said one of the other tuna fisherman, as he left for the deck. ‘Eh, come and sit here,’ Sonny was nudging her. ‘Yeah, okay.’ Diana could not shift her eyes from the television, after that. She sat on Sonny’s lap, his hands beneath her shirt, and his cock hard against the small of her back. She could hear Nicole breathing heavily. They all could. Diana dared not glance at Slim, or the couple of other older men still below 59
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deck, though she could sense their still, quiet shapes. Sonny’s tongue was circling her ear and she thought how rotten it might taste in there. The video went on. The Americans were also on a boat, though theirs was a luxury yacht and it made the little galley on their own fishing trawler look pretty tragic in comparison. ‘You’re wet,’ she heard Sonny whisper, and then she shut her eyes. She leant back and just let it happen. Sonny was inserting his fingers right inside, but then he had hold of her tits and it seemed that somebody else was between her legs, another man, his warm, wet kisses on her thigh. She spread her legs wide and pushed against the stranger. A woman on the video was moaning. And there was a hard relentless pinching at Diana’s nipples. Suddenly the video switched off and there was a loud white noise. She opened her eyes and the sunlight from up on deck was blinding. ‘Oh, come on. Fair go!’ The skipper was furious. ‘Filthy mongrels. Not on my fucking time!’ ‘Oh, what?’ ‘Up on deck, the lot of youse.’ ‘Jesus.’ ‘You want the fucking sack, is that what youse want?’ Diana pulled her tracksuit pants up. Her knickers were twisted. Nicole elbowed her in the ribs as they climbed back on deck. ‘I don’t care what you do on shore, but you can bloody 60
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well behave yourselves on my boat. Fucking unbelievable. Once more and you’re off, the lot of youse.’ The blokes kept away from them after that. One day the skipper hauled in a marlin. It was huge, beautiful, all glistening silvery blue. The sea is so full, thought Diana. ‘If I caught a fish like that, I’d have it stuffed.’ ‘No way, not when the Japs will give you ten grand for it.’ ‘Yeah, that’s a point.’ Diana loved to pull the slimy mackerel and yellow tail out of the live bait tank, combing through the crowded bodies of fish with her fingertips. This is the hand of God, she thought. She’d never imagined that choices could have textures. When the wind was over fifty knots the skipper refused to go out to sea, and Nicole and Diana could spend the day together on shore, away from the blokes. They took long walks on the beach and sunbaked topless. A friendship had developed between them that was beyond anything Diana had ever known. It was solid and reliable. They could communicate full phrases with a simple glance. With Nicole, Diana felt sheltered. She felt safe. Close to the end of the season, the girls turned fifteen, three days apart. They were staying upstairs at the Ulladulla Royal. The long pub verandah began to leak. A young man spent three hundred and fifty dollars on a taxi from Sydney to meet Nicole for lunch. 61
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‘It’s Harry, the one from the North Shore.’ She didn’t have to say much more than that. Diana had a general sense of what it meant. ‘His folks have gone OS. I think I’m going to bail. I’ll see you when you get back to Sydney, hey Di? Give us a few days.’
62
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3 orting them out early it’s Holy Smoke in the lead, Morgan’s Gallop heading wide off the rail, The Sparrow, Luci Loo, Taking It Easy, Weekend Away, Mitchie’s Flame, Fling Me Barney, Arrowhead, Please Me. They’re coming at it left, right and centre but it’s Holy Smoke taking herself well away from the pack. ‘Come on, baby!’ Still a fair way off the turn it’s Holy Smoke in the clear, The Sparrow surging forward, Luci Loo over on the fence, Weekend Away wide as they run out of the straight and Fling Me Barney at the rear flank for fifth position. ‘Hold it there for me, matey. Hold it forward. Go, Holy Smoke!’ Diana saves three steaks from turning black on the grill. I think it could be Weekend Away. It’s The Sparrow. The Sparrow and Holy Smoke. The Sparrow and Holy Smoke.
S
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Holy Smoke a neck ahead. But it’s Weekend Away gaining ground. Weekend Away facing the breeze. ‘Oh no. Oh Jesus. What’s he doing to the fuckin’ horse? Jesus, give it some neck, mate. Fuck!’ It’s Weekend Away beating Holy Smoke over the line followed closely by The Sparrow for Race Six at Bathurst. Then we’ve got Luci Loo, Arrowhead, Mitchie’s Flame, Fling Me Barney … The radio goes off. Now Diana can hear the row of drivers at the counter sucking on their cigarettes. A few heads shake slowly left to right, right to left, left to right. ‘Another one bites the dust.’ ‘Poor bastard.’ ‘Yeah.’ Diana serves herself colour-starved carrots, pumpkin, string beans, lamb and potato stew from the bain-marie. It’s Christmas Eve. She sits down to stare at the crossword and can only get one clue. Four across. Five letters. Stomach of cow, prepared as food. Tripe.
Later that night Bob’s dogs are going crazy, half-barking, half-growling, pulling at their chains and dragging their sawn-off rainwater tank kennels toward the back paddock. Diana wakes, her head still hazy from sleep, and steps out onto the homestead verandah. It’s dark, yet she can make out the shadow of a woman, over by the road. Maybe 64
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she’s imagining it, but the more she looks at it, the more actual the shadow becomes, until the vision is as sturdy as anything real.There’s a slouch to the figure, a folding forward at the shoulders, and she is reminded immediately of her own mother, the shame in the body. The shadow begins to move. It really is a woman, a young woman. The figure crosses into the subtle light of the AMPOL sign and moves in the direction of Bob’s van. Diana can see red sequins, brittle on the narrow skirt, and long legs in fishnet stockings. In the morning there’s a road bike parked close to Bob’s annexe. Diana hears it start up as she’s serving breakfast to the usual takers. She looks out the front window in order to catch a glimpse of the rider, but the bike is heading west, and the sound of it rumbles away without ever having come into view. ‘Merry Christmas, Alice,’ she says to the dog that’s wagging its tail at her feet.
‘Do you reckon Nola really is a clairvoyant?’ Bob laughs. ‘Oh, you know, she reckons she is, eh. I’m probably not the best person to ask. All a crock of shit, I reckon. Why’d you want to know?’ ‘I’m just interested.’ ‘Nola’s been really good to me, you know? She’s helped me out that many times it’s not funny. But she’s got her own problems. Her kid Tash is on methadone now, and 65
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Nola gets landed with Tash’s two kids all the time. Bit of a handful is Tash. Charlie Black’s good to Nola, though. She’s lucky she come across Charlie Black when she did. She had this bikie fella she’d been married to before. Tash’s dad. He was a jealous bastard, too. Beat her up and that. He was a real arsehole and you know what Nola’s like, she’d go right out of her way for anyone. They’re into some nasty shit those gang fellas, always the club comes first, forget about the women.’ Diana shrugs. ‘I never really knew any bikies.’ ‘Anyway, this mob that I’m in a bit of a tizz with at the mo, Nola knows ’em all. They like their Harleys, see, and she’s got a few old connections there.’ Diana watches the tobacco at the tip of her cigarette glow amber as she taps it against the ashtray. She wonders what sort of a ‘tizz’ Bob is actually in. ‘Me sister likes to keep an eye on me, she reckons, God bless her. I hope she knows what she’s getting herself in for. I hope she fuckin’ can see shit other people can’t.’ ‘Yeah,’ Diana smiles, trying to sound understanding but noncommittal. ‘What about your family, Di?’ ‘Mine?’ She shakes her head. ‘There’s just me and me mum.’ Diana watches the green and red Christmas tinsel she twined together last week fluttering in front of the breeze from the airconditioner. She taps at her cigarette again, and breathes out a long tunnel of smoke. ‘Apparently they’ve 66
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moved her to Broken Hill. She’s in a boarding house. Kind of a nursing home. A hostel.’ ‘Do you see her?’ ‘Not since I was fourteen.’ ‘Jesus. What’s that? Four years, five years?’ ‘About that.’ Diana rarely thinks about her mum any more. It has taken a long time for it to be like this. Audrey Stewart is a drunk. Nothing more. Nothing less. Whatever she once might have been, she wasn’t any longer. When Diana pictures Audrey she sees the whole body slumped in a chair. The head bowed and nodding. The eyes three-quarters shut. When she was small she thought if she looked after her mum, she could really help. For a while, she brought her mum breakfast in bed in the morning. She learnt how to take money out of Audrey’s purse on pension day when she was drunk. She learnt how to budget for groceries, and where to hide the gin. She thought she could help her mum to change. No. Her mum disappointed her. Diana couldn’t help. And after a while she gave up trying. ‘You can’t really help other people, not really,’ she tells Bob. ‘If people want to fuck themselves up, they’ll do it. You can’t stop them.’ There are a few fond memories Diana keeps of her mum, though she would never admit them to anybody. When Audrey was in hospital one year, the nurses told them about a girl in Africa who wanted children all over the world to help her to make paper cranes. Audrey knew how to make them. 67
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She and Diana spent hours and hours doing it. They made some every time Diana visited, every day for weeks and weeks. They must have made about three or four hundred of them. They were all different colours. As it turned out, nobody knew quite where in Africa the paper crane girl lived. The nurses strung them up with string, all around the hospital ward. ‘Healing cranes,’ her mother called them. ‘They’re healing cranes. I’ll be better after this, you’ll see.’ And she was, too, for a little while. ‘So, you and your mum, you don’t even keep in touch?’ Bob is asking her. Diana shakes her head. ‘I’ve got a kind of an auntie — not related, just a friend of the family kind of thing. My friend’s mum. She keeps in touch about her, well she has the last year or two, since ... anyway, I just steer clear of the whole thing. My mum’s not my responsibility, the way I see it. She couldn’t look after me. Fucked if I’ll do it for her, eh.’ Bob looks down at his hands. Feels in his pockets for his cigarettes. ‘Anyway,’ Diana continues. ‘I reckon if you’ve got friends, you’ve got family.’ At least that’s what she used to believe. That’s what she used to say to Nicole. ‘Yeah, as long as they’re good friends,’ says Bob. ‘As long as you can trust ’em.’ Diana watches two dogs by the old water tanks, biting each other’s faces. She kind of wishes Christmas Day 68
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would hurry up and be over. It’s too quiet. She doesn’t like having so little to do.
After the job in Ulladulla, the girls had enough cash to set up house and a social worker at the DSS helped them to get a rental. It was a cheap single-storey terrace down the Ultimo end of Glebe. Soon Harry and his North Shore mates were turning up there several nights a week. And they always came with bags full of drugs. Somebody’s olds were paying for all that shit, though they probably didn’t know it. Diana had always preferred leaf and tip to heads. She liked the silliness factor, the way every stupid thing could make you laugh. She hated the stronger stuff, the resinous oily heads that forced you to slow down so substantially you could hardly stand up. She got too self-conscious on that stuff, worried about every little word she said, every gesture she made. When Harry began to arrive with his mobile chemist’s bag full of a whole range of goodies she and Nicole had never even tried before, he seemed a little like Santa Claus to them. Diana liked speed and ecstasy the best, and she would settle for ephedrine too. On a high like that, she and Nicole would sometimes night-walk for hours, just like they used to do in Nyngan, and they could talk until their jaws hurt, about anything and everything. The girls discovered LSD through Harry as well, and took trips that seemed like long holidays, dancing all night in bars in 69
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Darlinghurst, where even ten minutes in the women’s toilets could be an amazing adventure. Diana was fascinated by the hallucinations the drug made possible. She watched butterflies swarming out of Nicole’s eyes, and maggots coming to life in her own shoes. As a child, she’d sometimes witnessed her mother hallucinate, and it turned out to be just as frightening and fantastic as she’d imagined it would be. Harry was a big fan of what Diana preferred to call ‘cotton wool’ drugs. He liked Valium and codeine. He liked Mogodon. Diana felt it was like being wrapped in cotton wool. You couldn’t manage to do anything much. But Nicole liked the ‘opioid’ family. She thought Harry was some kind of godsend, some kind of miracle. ‘This is heaven,’ she reckoned, her voice slow, her words in a slur. Diana began to listen to Nicole and Harry in the neighbouring room at night, the way Nicole gasped and moaned beneath him like a desperate cat. She watched them stare at each other across the kitchen table, drowsy and delirious, hands resting on one another’s thighs. The two of them were drifting away from Diana, into another world. And soon there was the way Harry kept turning up at the front door, minus his mates. ‘G’day, Di.’ ‘Harry.’ ‘Is my girl in?’ Diana was fond of that little Glebe house. It was next door to an Aboriginal housing project and down the road 70
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from the inky black water of the industrial port. She watched young kids learning to box in a streetfront warehouse opposite Wentworth Park and picked up spent bookie’s stubs from the nearby greyhound track. Sometimes, when Harry wasn’t there, the girls set up a makeshift salon in the few square metres of concrete behind the kitchen, and styled one another’s hair. Diana loved to sit while Nicole lathered on the shampoo, and then rinsed with tepid water from a blue kitchen jug. The hair dye was painted on in small square tufts with a cheap general purpose paint brush. They preferred blacks or reds, though sometimes there was a lurid Krazy Kolour, a purple or a bright orange. Diana liked the way the dye felt cold against her scalp. The girls sat drinking tea until the timer went off. They were somewhere between kids imitating hairdressers in salons they’d seen on TV, and adults playing in their own fully improvised script. Nic used hand gestures to exaggerate speech, laughed loudly, calling her darling and gorgeous. The colour was rinsed off into a bucket behind the chair, the client’s head tilted right back, legs forward and ankles together as a counterweight to prevent the chair from toppling over. Conditioner was applied, the hairdresser’s fingers moving in circles beginning at the top of the forehead, cruising up and back, softly around the top of the crown, then down and deep into the base of the neck. Wrists glided against ears. Sometimes the hairdresser’s hands cupped together and lingered like a swimming hat for a moment, a light pressure across the whole scalp. And sometimes Nicole’s hands 71
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took the full weight of Diana’s head and neck. Her mind hung there, completely empty of thought. When the cutting began, Diana knew the whole thing was nearly over. The hairdryer, snaked on an extension cord through the kitchen window, was hot against her skin. And when she opened her eyes, the light was almost too bright to bear. One night she lay in bed listening to Harry and Nicole talking about her. ‘She’s just fucking weird,’ Harry was saying. ‘Nah, she’s all right.’ ‘How come she’s always mysteriously appearing right when you and I … you know. She’s sick.’ Nicole was quiet for a moment. ‘She’s like a sister to me. She likes to keep an eye out for me, that’s all. She and I do that for each other. She’s a good mate.’ Her friend paused. ‘Besides, she hasn’t got anybody else.’
The little accounts desk in the office off the cool room is covered in invoices and faxes, some of them with boot marks on them. Diana leans against the counter, surveying the chaos from a safe distance. ‘Off with the pixies, darlin’?’ ‘What?’ It’s Con Sweet F.A., the giver of pickles. ‘Not a morning person,’ says his T-shirt. ‘Look at you. You’re a million miles away.’ 72
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‘I was just thinking about … I dunno. There’s so much to do to keep this place ticking over.’ ‘Hey?’ ‘I dunno. Bob just fucks off all the time. He’s off again tonight. He reckoned he was gonna drive all the way to Bathurst. What about the service station, the maintenance on the bowsers and all that? I dunno how he keeps the place afloat.’ Con slouches over one of the dining tables, poking loose serviettes back into a serviette holder. ‘Yeah, well, you know. He’s always got a few pots on the boil, has Bob.’ The last stray serviette is poked in. Con turns his fidgeting to the cigarette packet. ‘Can I get you something, Con?’ Con looks out at his canvas-covered load. ‘Oh, just another coffee thanks, love.’ She moves to get it for him. ‘Listen, he hasn’t left anything for me, has he?’ ‘No, why? What should he have left?’ ‘Ah, nothing. They reckon he was a good bloke, you know, Bob’s old man. He was the one that set up this place here. But he was a TAB fella too, liked to have a flutter. They’re two peas in a pod. Thrive on the adrenalin, you know? Mad bastards.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘But don’t worry about this place, love. It’s not for you to get your tits in a tangle over. It’s not your problem.’ ‘Yeah, I guess.’ Diana can see Con’s hands shaking as he 73
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holds the faint blue and white paper sugar packet above his polystyrene cup. Her mother used to do that. Shake, shake. Like the soft flicker of a TV set close to the end of its life. ‘Ah, well, darlin’, gotta get moving.’ Con stands. ‘Hang in there. Think of the money you’re making, eh. He pays you all right? Gives you ya overtime?’ ‘Yeah, he does.’ It’s a dark night, and late. The restaurant seems too cold. She would turn the aircon down if it weren’t for the switch being a matter of either ON or OFF. The drink fridge needs stacking again. How can people drink that much Coke? It sells just about as well as the fuel. ‘See ya, mate.’ ‘See ya.’ Diana kneels behind the display fridge and opens a new box with a Stanley knife. She has got more used to being here alone. Bob keeps a baseball bat behind the till and there’s been a few times when she’s rested her hands on it while talking to someone over the counter, and imagined picking it up, holding it high. But it seems that most of the customers are okay, and there’s just about always someone familiar in the carpark. ‘Fuck!’ The door swings open and Diana jumps. ‘Fuck!’ It’s Con. ‘Come out here and get a look at this.’ His face is white with shock. Diana puts down the Stanley knife and follows Con out into the warm night air. She scans the parking area. 74
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There are loose pieces of black dog hair blowing about the bitumen, forming small mountains of tuft on the white pebbles near the airconditioning unit. She follows Con to a black mound by the diesel bowsers. It’s Alice, Bob’s kelpie, covered in blood. Diana draws breath and kneels down beside the dog. ‘What do you think happened?’ Con shifts restlessly from one foot to another, his arms crossed, his hands tucked in close to his armpits. He says nothing. Looks away. ‘Dog fight?’ ‘Would’ve heard it.’ The dog is split down the stomach and throat, with another deep wound at the top of the back leg. She’s obviously bled a lot, but there are no fresh puddles here. ‘Looks like somebody’s got stuck into her with a knife.’ ‘Fuck!’ ‘Like she’s been dumped here from somewhere else.’ ‘Fuck!’ Diana leans close over the lifeless mess of dog. ‘Oh, Alice.’ She squints out toward the rocks along the eastern edge of the road. Suddenly every little dark stain in the carpark seems like more of Alice’s blood. ‘The fence line along Brady’s station. She could have ripped her stomach open on that old fence.’ ‘This is not an accident.’ Con is wide-eyed and serious, his pupils sharp as pinpricks. ‘Somebody’s stabbed a fuckin’ 75
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dog! I can’t believe it.’ He seems on the verge of tears. ‘Slaughtered it. Fuckin’ slaughtered it.’ ‘How could they?’ ‘There’s some nasty fucking cunts out there, kid. Payback. Has to be.’ The breeze rises up against them from out in the black space of night, flapping the canvas blinds against the west side of the building and lifting the roll of paper towel beside the bowsers into a long white curve. It’s a cool breeze. Normally such a thing would be refreshing. ‘Some fucking wind.’ ‘It’s the southerly.’ Diana turns and moves back into the restaurant. Paper serviettes run and spin about the floor of the dining area. Con follows her in. ‘You’ll have to track Bob down. For Christ’s sake, it’s his favourite dog. Ten years he’s had Alice for a mate. You’ll have to call him.’ Diana puts on rubber gloves at the sink and picks up a bright orange garbage bag from behind the main counter. Con is agitated, fearful. He is not himself. ‘Just be careful. Just be careful what you say on the phone,’ he’s saying. Diana remains calm, partly in the hope of the effect rubbing off on Con. There’s something unsettling about his level of paranoia. She looks him in the eye and it seems clear to her now that he’s speeding off his head. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? Diana heads out the front again, trying to ignore Con and focusing instead on the body of the dog. Out in the 76
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parking area the light is icy fluorescent blue. Aside from Con’s semi, there’s not a single rig in the lot. The dog’s body is not yet stiff, perhaps even still slightly warm as she picks up the carcass and puts it as best she can into the garbage bag. It’s almost in three pieces. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. The breeze blows Diana’s hair across her face. She pushes it back with gloved hands, staining her skin with Alice’s blood. Then her eyes are all steaming up. Everything looks blurry. This is too much. It seems years since tears have fallen across her face with such silent urgency. Diana carries the loaded orange garbage bag around and around the parking lot for long minutes, not wanting to place it in the big blue steel bin, but not knowing what else to do with it. The summer ground will be too hard to dig. She curses Bob. Eventually she places the tied bag in the big steel bin near the old shed and lowers the lid, talking reassuringly to Alice as if the kelpie were still alive, still sniffing about at her feet. ‘Hey? There we are, girl. You’ll be right, now, sweetie. We’ll keep you from the crows. There we go, Alice.’ Back in the restaurant she watches Con stirring his coffee repeatedly. It’s a full cup. The coffee’s going to spill over it. He’s pacing manically up and down, long drags on the Peter Jackson. ‘Fuckin’ mad cunts. What kind of fuckin’ nasty mad cunts are we starting to get in this country? What kind of fucker would do this to a dog? What the FUCK is going on?’ Diana swallows. The phone. Where is the phone? 77
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4 here was something Diana glimpsed from the train all those weeks ago, on her way from Central to Lithgow as the sun was coming up. She sat looking out the window, just like everybody else, but just on the other side of Penrith, she witnessed something odd. It was some kind of disaster, she realises now. A group of emergency workers in fluorescent safety vests gathered on the tracks near the end of an outer suburban platform. They were surrounding the front of a stationary train. Police and ambulance vehicles lined the nearby streets. People were gathered on the traffic bridge and the nearby footpaths in small groups of two and three, looking down toward the tracks. Diana’s westbound train didn’t even slow. She strained her neck to try to see a body, a stretcher, a brightly coloured sheet of plastic covering something on the tracks. But her view was blocked. Just as she craned her neck all she could see was brickwork,
T
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the underbelly of an overpass. Diana looked about her on the carriage, but everybody else seemed indifferent. They seemed to have missed the whole scene. Perhaps they just weren’t looking in the right direction at the right moment. According to Bob there is such a thing as an accident. ‘An accident?’ Was losing control of the Suzuki an accident? Was running from the scene, and from the city, an accident too? Perhaps Alice’s murder has given Diana a taste for the macabre. She finds herself loading the Coke cans into the fridge, one by one, and thinking about Nicole. Maybe she’s dead. Maybe she’s not. The cans are warm against Diana’s palms and she loads the shelf slowly. ‘Dead,’ she says, placing a can on the shelf. ‘Alive,’ she says, placing another. Once she has emptied the first box, the shelf still isn’t full. She opens another box, shuffling the already shelved cans forward, and closing the distance between them. She is going to fit as many cans on the one shelf as is physically possible. ‘Dead, alive, dead, alive, dead, alive.’ She tries to fit the very last can (‘dead’) on the shelf with the others, but can’t. She tries denting it a little. She taps it against the steel corner of the fridge, and pushes hard against the shelved cans. No. It won’t fit. She’s alive then, apparently. But Diana remains unconvinced. There is always an even number of cans in a box of Coke. Shelves, too, are probably designed to fit a strictly even number of cans. It doesn’t mean anything. She shoves the last can in forcefully, and shuts the door. 79
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When next a customer opens the display fridge from the front, one of the cans will fall smack on the floor at his feet.
In the days that follow Bob is restless but always around. The slaughter of Alice has knocked him. He uses a paintchipped and half-rusted little bobcat to dig a hole for the body, transfers the dog from bin to ground, then fills in the grave. He leaves no cross. He limits Diana’s shifts to eight precise hours, even gives her lunch breaks, taking up the extra work himself as if grateful for something to do. During her shift, Diana watches him walk in circles in and around the small group of buildings. Sometimes he is in the big shed, tinkering with cars Diana hasn’t seen him bother to touch until now. Later, he’s flicking a tape measure out thirty centimetres or so from its case, then letting it spring back, mid-air. Out, in, out, in, measuring nothing. Or he’s checking that his eyeglasses are there in his front breast pocket, flicking the soft velcro of the glasses case open and closed as he contemplates what to do next. ‘Anybody can have a long run of outs,’ he says to her one afternoon, squatting to fill a tyre at the air hose. ‘It’s natural. If you bet on the horses, you can make some fantastic gains, right, but you can also end up with a long run of outs now and then. It doesn’t mean you’ve lost the knack, or you’re doing your homework all wrong. You just have to ride it out. Like a mate of mine says, you got to keep turning up to place your bet, otherwise you might be in the middle of a 80
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winning streak and you wouldn’t even know it. I know I’ll end up the winner over the long haul. I know my sport.’ Diana nods. ‘What has all this got to do with the dog?’ she wants to ask, but doesn’t, preparing instead to go back into the kitchen to check the temperature on the pies. At the door to the restaurant, she finds Bob is directly behind her, wiping his greasy mechanic’s hands on his trousers, and holding the door open. He hasn’t finished. ‘Trouble is, when you run a business like I do, what with the fuel companies being on your back all the time, there’s always people that I’m going to owe money to, right, with a shop like this, all the food wholesalers to keep the restaurant tickin’ over, and people like yourself, Di, whose wages I’ve got to find every week, and there’s all kinds of insurance premiums you’ve got to come up with all the time. It’s not easy, I tell you. I’m sometimes just flyin’ by the seat of me pants with this place. I tell you what, if I wasn’t earnin’ a regular income on top from me sports bettin’, this place would have gone down the tube by now, well and truly.’ He helps himself to a fresh can of Coke. ‘Look, I’m the first to admit, I’ve had a streak of bad luck lately. That’s what I wanted to have a bit of a word to you about, actually, Di.’ Diana thinks of the used syringes piling up increasingly every time she cleans the Men’s, and of the way Con questioned her the night the dog died. ‘Listen, he hasn’t left anything for me, has he?’ 81
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Bob’s dealing, she thinks. Bob leans forward, lowering his voice. ‘There’s a horse called Dorky racing at Doomben on Saturday, four dollars sixty, she’s a sure thing.’ His eyes are alight with possibility. ‘But the thing is I need to shuffle a few of me obligations about, you know what I’m saying? So last week’s pay, and next week’s, and that includes your Christmas bonus, I’m just going to need to put off giving you that until after the weekend. I mean, it’s Thursday, right? Just a few days, and it’s not like you’ve got rent to pay or a food bill or anything yourself, love. You’ve got all that looked after here, haven’t you? It’s not a bad racket, really, this kitchenhand thing, is it? There’s nothing to spend your money on out here, anyway. Think of it as just being put into a little savings account for you, in the form of old Bob here, right?’ Diana stops what she’s doing at the pie warmer and looks at her boss with a certain shock, or incomprehension, until he starts to fidget again, feeling his shorts pocket for his tape measure, and wandering back out to the bowsers. ‘Fucking hell,’ she manages, as the door swings shut behind him.
Thank God for Tuesdays, when the blue Western Star pulls up in the carpark, and the driver with the beautiful scar climbs down. Sometimes he arrives early, before she knocks off on a Monday night, and she smiles at him as she wipes her hands on her handtowel, forgetting the list of customer 82
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orders she usually keeps so effortlessly in her head. Sometimes it’s three o’clock on a Tuesday morning when he climbs into her bed. Diana makes love to Andy West with her eyes open, watching both their bodies in the available light, and gliding her hands along him, just as she feels his hands on her own skin. Sometimes his cock moves so slowly and smoothly inside her she can feel the seconds slowing down. When she lies beside him afterwards, running her fingers through his hair as he lies still, breathing gently, it occurs to her that happiness is very, very simple. Perhaps it always has been. She just didn’t know it before. If only the feeling of satisfaction she gets from Andy West could be extracted and used to infuse all the time she spends not fucking him. Even as it is, she feels the afterglow of their intercourse for half a day after he’s driven away. Whether she has the same effect on him, she doesn’t know. It would be risking too much to ask.
One Tuesday afternoon, early in the New Year, Diana sits in Andy’s rig with the cab doors open wide. He has to leave again soon. She leans against him slightly, one hand on his thigh. ‘I wish you could stay.’ Andy breathes out. ‘Nah,’ he says. They watch a grey station wagon pull up at the other end of the carpark. No sooner has it stopped than the bonnet is up, the engine steaming. Three children are running loops 83
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around the vehicle while Dad stands at the front of the car. Dad’s moving his arms about enthusiastically as he speaks. Or perhaps he’s angry. It’s hard to tell from this distance. ‘What did your father do?’ Diana asks Andy. ‘My father?’ Andy laughs. ‘Why?’ ‘I’m just interested.’ ‘He was a builder.’ ‘What was he like?’ ‘Oh, God,’ he smiles. ‘My father was a hopeless builder. His houses were foul. Unsealed finishes. Bits all out of square. The local plumbers had it in for him, so his bathrooms and kitchens always had fittings missing.’ Diana smiles. ‘Most of the things I remember about Dad, though, are to do with the greyhounds. We spent long Saturdays at the dog track at Bulli. I used to think the motorised rabbit skin the dogs were chasing was a real live hare tied to a motorised seat. A fresh one for each race. It used to make this noise as it warmed up, a squeaky electrical kind of wail. The dogs’ ears were all raised up. And then there’d be this wave of yells from the grandstand crashing across the track. The best bit was just after the end of the race, when the dogs slowed down and jogged around, all confused and cheeky, trying to escape their trainers. My dad used to get the shits with them, then,’ he smirks. ‘Was your dad a trainer?’ ‘Yeah. We used to spend so much bloody time at the dogs. Me and the other kids went wild at that track some 84
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times. We used to hang around outside the toilets and launch water bombs at people as they came out. One time we flogged six fresh bottles of Scotch from out the back of the members’ lounge and used them as targets for our sling shots. I tell you what, though, Dad had a temper all right. Sometimes when he’d get the shits about the dogs and that, he’d just take off from the track without me. He’d just leave me there. One time he did it I was only about six or seven.’ ‘What about your mum?’ ‘She never went anywhere.’ The verve drops out of Andy’s voice. ‘She still doesn’t.’ ‘What’s wrong with her?’ ‘I don’t know. Well, she is a bit … she’s a diabetic, but … I don’t know. She just likes to stay home, I guess.’ The woman over at the station wagon looks worried, one hand resting on the open passenger door, the other clasping a thermos. It’s as if she’s unsure what to do next: there’s the children, the car, the husband, the tea. Diana shifts a hand along Andy’s leg. ‘Can’t you stay? Just a while longer?’ ‘Nah,’ Andy sighs and cracks his knuckles. Next he is turning the key in the truck’s ignition and bringing the engine to life. The children at the other end of the carpark are imitating their father’s movements, exaggerating wildly and laughing with broad smiles only partly hidden behind small hands. Their father wipes his hands on his trousers and laughs with them. 85
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‘Beats me how a man can walk out on his own kids,’ Diana says quietly. ‘What? Where did that come from?’ Diana is unsure of herself now, exposed. She glances at the man next to her. ‘God, don’t look at me like that,’ he says. ‘Like what?’ ‘Like that.’ Andy squints at her. She closes her mouth and swallows, looks away. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he says, and takes her hand off his knee, squeezes it. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to make me late.’ ‘I know.’ Something tugs at her, a dull feeling in her belly. ‘See ya.’ ‘Yeah, see ya then.’ But Andy hasn’t looked her in the eye. Diana shuts the cabin door and stands back to watch the dust cloud up at the edge of the road as he swings out onto the blacktop. They barely know each other, really, so why this feeling of need, of belonging? Does he feel it too? He must feel it. Her stomach rumbles, a tight knot. She tries not to look back at the road again as she walks toward the old house.
‘It was so bloody close to an absolutely phenomenal win. I had the works down on Dorky. It was a top-class opportunity, I tell you. God Almighty wouldn’t have predicted it. 86
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But the filly got mixed up in a bumping duel for almost the whole length of the straight, then she surges ahead and, you wouldn’t dream about it, hey, just misses out, the closest of photos, beaten by a nose hair. Even the paper’s written it up, look: “Dorky is the best of good things beaten.” The best of good things, and she was fucking beaten by a nose. Oh, man, she was a good punt, all right, nothing wrong with her form. And she’ll come good again, don’t you worry.’ He sighs. ‘I’ve got to admit, it makes a man close to throwing in the towel, I tell you. I’ve been a bit worried, all right. But look, I sat myself down at the bar in Cobar, you know, the Great Western, you know the pub, beautiful old pub that one, eh, all the old verandahs and that.’ Diana knows it. ‘And I had to remind myself, it’s all gonna come good. There’s no need to panic. It’ll come good, you know? The luck will turn. The luck will turn.’ And he resumes his wandering, his hanging around, his measuring of air.
It’s a welcome distraction to find Bob’s niece, Tash, pulling up in an old station wagon with kids hanging out the open windows and dogs breathing up against the kids. As the car slows, the children start opening doors and their mother shouts at them to stay in. Tash turns out to be only a year or two older than Diana. She has sharp black eyes and a shark tooth on a 87
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piece of leather around her neck. She seems familiar, somehow. ‘Mum said I should stop and see if you wanted to come with us,’ she says. ‘We’re going to the rodeo out at Wilcannia. I can drop you back here later tonight, if you want.’ Bob smiles broadly at his niece. ‘Go on, Di, if you wanna go. Get you out of here for a bit, anyway.’ There’s what might be a hint of conspiracy between Tash and Bob as Diana glances from one to the other. But perhaps she’s reading too much into it. She nods and pockets her keys. ‘Yeah, sure.’ ‘Get back in youse kids.’ The station wagon’s front seat is covered in dog hair, cigarette burns and stains from the baby’s leaking juice bottle but Diana feels at home as the beat-up Kingswood rattles along the road out to where the temporary stockyards have been set up. She shuts her eyes and leans against the strap of the seatbelt, the hot breeze in her fringe. In the back, the two kids and the dogs are squealing at each other in turns. ‘Do you want a stubbie?’ ‘Yeah, thanks, Tash.’ ‘How you liking it out here in the middle of nowhere? Busy enough for you?’ ‘It’s all right.’ ‘I love a good rodeo. The boys’ll be all done up, all bright shirts. Bob reckons you’ve never been to one.’ 88
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‘No, I have been, but not since I was a kid, about this big,’ she says, dropping her hand down toward her ankle. They pull up to a dirt carpark and into a whirl of dust and bright colour. There are cowboys everywhere, all dolled up in sparkling red, yellow or silver shirts with shiny pearled or silver studs. There are old blackfella stockmen standing tall with the pride of expertise in their eyes, and their grandsons are handsome as all hell. There’s mobs of women from out Wilcannia way — Ngemba women and Wangaibon women — talking bits of their own language in between the English. There are horse trucks and cattle trucks and utes, the smell of dust and diesel and leather. Country music is blaring. Diana used to hate this kind of music. Simple and American and stupid. But here there’s a lilt to it that’s uncomplicated, bluesy, comforting. After a little while the DJ swings the sound closer to rhythm and blues and Diana’s tapping her fingers against her thigh, humming along. She smiles at herself. If Nic could see her now. She and Tash spread blankets on the back of Joe Spookey’s trayback and crack open fresh stubbies. They joke about men’s thighs as they grip a horse’s back, and giggle like girls. Tash’s kids run wild and endanger themselves left and right. Diana starts on the cones and watches riders stagger and bulls twitch with fiery hate. The day collapses into late afternoon faster than it has for weeks. Close to midnight, the makeshift yards and tents remain alive with risk and defeat and luck and beer and 89
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laughter. She and Tash pack up and the old station wagon finally hits the bitumen, the show and all its coloured lights receding into the distance. Tash seems a little too out of it to be driving. Perhaps it’s because of this that they drive along in complete silence. The air is thick with humidity. Diana feels slow, lethargic and the kids are well and truly asleep. ‘Reckon it’s gonna rain,’ says Tash, after a while, steering off centre a little as she turns to look at Diana. ‘Yeah.’ After an hour or so, they pass the sign: ‘Bob’s Place. Clean toilets. Free coffee for driver. Hot Food. 2 kms.’ Diana feels like she could do with a decent shower and a lie down. There’s a slight sense of dread in going back to the routine after a glimpse of fun and restlessness. She is covered, as they all are, in dust. ‘Di?’ ‘Mmm.’ ‘Isn’t that Bob’s ute?’ Diana is looking out to the eastern side of the road. She can see the truck-stop coming up ahead, a roof amongst the seven trees. Well before the roadhouse turnoff, Bob’s blue Belmont has come fully into view, its doors wide open and the headlights a long dull shine. The ute sits a hundred metres or so off the road, its nose in the scrub. ‘You better stop.’ Tash pulls over to the side of the road and then off into the scrub where the ground is bumpy and uneven. Diana 90
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has her door open before the car stops and she’s out, the dogs following her, sensing a rapid heartbeat or a scent of fear. The dogs reach the ute first and they whine and snuffle, running circles around it, noses to ground. They converge behind a mound of grass. As she gets closer, she sees Bob, face down, a circle of blood staining the shoulder of his blue denim shirt. She crouches, clearing the hair from his eyes. Diana’s shouting back toward the station wagon and then she’s grabbing for Bob’s hand. There’s a pulse there. He’s alive. No. Is it? Is he dead? She can’t feel the difference between his pulse and hers. Her heart is thumping. She tries two fingers at the neck. Tash appears, wide-eyed. ‘Jesus, is he still alive?’ ‘Yeah. I think so.’ Diana notices the colour of his lips. There’s a whiteness around the edges as if he’s been talking for days without a drink. His eyes are not shut all the way. There’s a tiny spot of blood inside one nostril. And then he groans. ‘It’s okay, Bob. It’s okay, mate.’
An accident? Call it what you like, it’s messy. Diana rushes back to the roadhouse office to call an ambulance. It comes after ninety minutes of waiting. Tash is crouched in the scrub holding Bob’s hand and she won’t stop crying. Diana rests her hand on Tash’s shoulder now and then. Tash’s crying wakes one of the kids, and then the 91
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kids are crying too, and Diana’s walking up and down the road edge jiggling the little one, who is screaming a highpitched wail into her ear, almost sending her deaf. People cry too easily. The ambos, when they finally get there, load Bob in with precision, not wasting a moment, and drive away fast in the direction from which they came, leaving the girls standing there in silence once again. One of the kids calls out from the back seat of the Kingswood. ‘Mum? Muummmyyy? Mu-um?’ The roadhouse kitchen has been left wide open, lights on. Someone has stolen the first three shelves of cigarettes. Peter Jackson. Dunhill. Winfield. There’s not a single truck in the parking area. Diana locks the bowsers then helps Tash to move the sleeping children from car seats to cabin bunks. They slouch at the restaurant counter while cold pies reheat in the microwave. Tash is quiet. ‘There’s something going on,’ says Diana, after a while. ‘There always has been something going on,’ replies Tash. She eyes Diana sharply. ‘Look …’ Diana starts. ‘No. You look. Just mind your own fucking business.’ In the morning the kids are noisy and unaffected. Little Josh turns his spoon into a big rig to load up his Coco Pops. ‘Bbbbssssshh. Bbbsssshhhh.’ Bits of the load fall off on the way in. Soon Tash is ready to make the trip back to town. ‘Hang in there, mate,’ Tash says, glibly. 92
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• • • Now the trucks keep pulling up. Diana grills, unwraps, chops, wipes down, nods, gives people change. The customer’s conversations are comforting in their monotony. ‘G’day, George.’ ‘G’day, Di.’ ‘Where you heading?’ ‘Adelaide for Wednesday night.’ ‘That’s easy enough.’ ‘Yeah.’ Next. ‘And she said, “Where do you come from?” ’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘And I said, “Bathurst.” And she’s just sitting there for a minute. And Carl’s sitting there laughing.’ Next. ‘How’s that daughter of yours, Tommy?’ ‘She’s doing an office administration course at TAFE.’ ‘I thought she was at that posh school.’ ‘Nah, she got her nose pierced and they expelled her.’ ‘Bullshit!’ Next. ‘He goes, “Here’s the rules for drivin’ the truck …” and it’s don’t do this, don’t do that.’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘I said, “Look here. You run your miles your way and we’ll run our miles our way.” ’ 93
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‘What did he say to that?’ ‘Ah, he wasn’t too happy.’ Somehow people’s stories mark one another. It’s not just the customers. It’s not just Bob. It’s everyone. Andy. Nicole. Harry. Now Tash and Nola. Cause and effect, cause and effect. What made her think she could just head west and escape? There’s no such thing as a fresh story, a new one, a clean go. Something’s caught up with Bob. Gambling debts. Warning signs. An ‘accident’. And for herself? There’s some kind of legacy, she knows there must be. It makes her shiver. It has her checking the placement of the iron bar beside her bed.
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5 reams are breaking up Diana’s sleep. Unwelcome dreams that stick in her throat, raising the rash on the skin of her forearms. Sometimes it’s a simple dream about a car on a highway, a hatchback, like a little Holden or Suzuki. It doesn’t fit with the other vehicles: the big rigs, the farmers’ utes, the delivery vans, the public servants in government-issue Fords. It doesn’t even resemble a tourist’s car. There is no luggage in the back seat, the cabin contains no pillows, no thermos. Sometimes even the driver’s seat is empty. Other dreams are worse. Dreams about a weight in her belly, something growing there, or some kind of blemish, something new and foreign. She dreams of diving into the narrow blue sound of water, a human body, feeling the surface of something, a child swimming, there’s the smell of laughter, relief.
D
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Diana dreams that she can’t open her eyes. She has to listen hard, listen for crying, listen out beyond the sound of her own breath. There is the word ‘fever’. And, too often, she wakes up.
There was a BANG BANG on the door of the King Street bedsit and it sounded serious. It woke her up one morning. Diana put on a T-shirt, pulled the door ajar, and peered out. ‘Where’s that mate of yours?’ ‘Hey?’ She’d never seen this guy before. He was tall, with an unshaven face. Big boots. ‘Nicole Clarke. Where’s Nicole Clarke?’ ‘I don’t know. She doesn’t live here.’ ‘Tell her she owes me money, the little slut. Tell her I’ve come looking for it, all right?’ ‘Look, I don’t even know where she is.’ Diana closed the door and stood listening to the guy’s heavy feet tramping back down the stairs. She knew exactly where Nicole was. Nicole was in hospital. She had overdosed before, but this was different. Apparently there was something wrong with her heart now. Murmurs. Missed rhythms. When Diana went up there to visit, later in the morning, she didn’t say anything about the visitor. She didn’t say anything much at all. She sat close to Nicole’s bed, leaning forward to watch Good Morning Australia on the little television set levered to the 96
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ceiling. Nicole wasn’t talking either. At eleven o’clock an announcement came over the PA asking visitors to leave and Diana stood up. On her way out she passed hospital staff walking quickly in plain colours along the hospital corridors. Other visitors walked lightly in comparison, as if tiptoeing. Some of them nodded at her in recognition, eyes tired, hair all out of place. A small group held low conversations beside the coin-operated coffee machine. Diana felt sad for them. She felt sad for herself. She felt sad for everyone. It was a long slow series of bus rides to get to work. The next day when Diana returned to the hospital, there was a red-haired woman in Nicole’s bed. She had her leg in a cast. ‘I don’t know, pet,’ she said. ‘Are you family?’ said the sister at the office down the hall. ‘Well, sort of.’ The sister peered across the computer screen at her and Diana could feel the woman’s eyes up and down the length of her body. There was a heavy outward breath, a kind of sigh. ‘Look, love, she checked herself out early this morning.’ ‘No forwarding address?’ ‘I couldn’t give it to you, even if there was.’ Harry was the problem, and had been since Glebe. Diana detested him. When Harry introduced Nicole to heroin, they did it without inviting Diana along. The two of 97
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them did it on a Sunday, in the privacy of Nicole’s bedroom, and then every Sunday became their ‘Special Day’. Nicole was enraptured, couldn’t separate the drug from the love affair. When they started using more often, Diana finally had a taste of it herself. But the drug just made her feel nauseous and blank. She vomited on the front steps. She was not like Nicole. She was not like Harry. Soon enough, three became a crowd. And the folding of the Glebe house was inevitable. ‘I’m thinking of moving in with Harry.’ Diana nodded. ‘I thought you might be.’ Harry’s parents owned a flat in Bondi. It was right near the beach, and directly above a music shop. The walls were painted with deep colours. The kitchen had a dishwasher. The laundry had a front-loading washing machine. Harry had the place to himself. He didn’t even have to pay rent. ‘It’d just be easier, that’s all,’ Nicole reckoned. ‘Easier for who?’ ‘Don’t be like that.’
The late afternoon light turns golden and clear, the sun a perfect orange circle. There is a conversation going on between two young drivers behind her and Diana can hear snippets of it here and there, as she drifts in and out of listening and the speakers drift in and out of raising their volume. ‘Thailand Buddha.’ ‘Mate?’ 98
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‘Two cones and …’ ‘We, um, mate, ridgy didge, it was orange. We used to have it all the time, eh.’ Diana feels a childish need for physical comfort and closeness. Someone to grab hold of. She’s waiting for Andy to return, but it doesn’t seem to be Tuesday yet. The recent events have clouded things. She can’t remember what day it is. Every day she works in the kitchen. Every day the place is open and she’s doing it all on her own. A red Volvo hauling timber pulls up in the carpark, coming to a noisy stop. Diana notices dark stains along the length of the bull bar and a little bit of fur hanging from one side, darkish. It’s Con’s truck. ‘Bigger than Texas,’ says his T-shirt. He takes up a stool a few down from Diana, placing his hat on the bar. She moves back around to the other side of the till. ‘What did you run into, Con? A roo or something?’ His voice comes tumbling out with a croak, tossed out to one side, like spit. ‘What?’ ‘Oh, I thought you might have hit a roo.’ Diana looks back out at his truck. ‘They reckon they’re thick as flies on the Nyngan–Cobar stretch this time of year. Thought you might have hit one, that’s all. Are you all right?’ He looks up at her sharply. ‘Fuck the fuckin’ roos.’ Diana looks for a third time out toward the truck. There’s blood at the front and right the way along the side. There’s also part of the body of something hanging off 99
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the back edge. It’s half a sheep. Looking out and up along the highway, Diana sees small pieces of meat and carcass following a path to where the truck had changed down gears to turn off. Shit. Con is leaning against the counter quietly now. Diana gets on with his usual order. He says nothing more. He finishes his coffee, stands, walks out quietly. Now the restaurant is empty, the other drivers have left without her noticing them going. Diana collects the salt and pepper shakers from the tables and deposits them in two separate groups along the bar. She retrieves large storage jars from the pantry and tops up the shakers. She does this expertly, without spilling a grain. She pairs the salts and peppers up again. They form stiff couples in a long row, with one salt left over. Soldiers, of a sort. Is it possible Con just ploughed through a whole flock of sheep? Just right over the top, without stopping?
The rigs pull up. The rigs pull out. She has to deal with the fuel companies, add up the weekly earnings and other things she doesn’t really know how to do. There are stray complaints from the drivers and a general sense of unease. Diana thinks she can detect a kind of haunting that’s stopping the future from falling easily into place. She opens Bob’s mail, mainly bills, then leaves it to pile up regardless on his office desk. 100
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Almost two weeks after Bob’s ‘accident’, Charlie Black pulls up in a V8 Ford Falcon and Bob and Nola climb out: Nola with a red vinyl suitcase and a carton of VB stubbies; Bob with crutches, a plaster cast on one leg and a row of stitches across the side of his face. ‘Here we go.’ They stumble in through the restaurant doors. ‘Hey, Di. How are ya?’ Bob is looking a little pale, but better than Diana thought he would look. He’s still grinning. ‘Sister dear’s come to help me out for a bit.’ ‘So I see.’ By mid-afternoon, Nola is sitting on one of the stools as Diana fiddles around, emptying the dishwasher or taking something out of the cool room to defrost. Since ten a.m. Nola has gone through three long neck VBs and one and a half packets of Dunhill and she’s on to schooner glasses full of claret. She’s got Diana to put the cask behind the counter, underneath the till. Sitting here, drinking, she tells Diana the story of Bob’s gambling. It’s a wavery story, meandering through two decades, chopping back and forth from past to present, from simple fact to brutal summing up. ‘First wife was a selfish bitch. Tried to sue the bastard. Second one was just plain fuckin’ mad. He can pick ’em, mate, I’m telling you, he wouldn’t have a clue.’ Nola tells an older sister’s story of a little brother who could never do right, not quite, not on his own anyway. 101
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‘Got a name for himself at the trots down at Dubbo. Banned him eventually. Wouldn’t let him near the joint. If I could tell you the number of paypackets he’s lost and found again, you know. He can’t help himself. We all thought, right, after me father died and left him this place out here, this’ll be good for him. Right away from it all. But fuck, no. All a man has to do is turn on the radio and phone up the TAB. I mean, he was good for a while, compared to how he was, you know. I think he knows this is his last chance. Christ, it’s a fucking miracle he’s kept it going like this as long as he has. Four years next April. It’s not bad going, for him. But he’ll never be much good to anyone. “The lucky bastard” is what me and Charlie call him. ’Cos he’s not one. Only he can’t see it.’ Nola taps her cigarette with a sense of finality, or perhaps pity. ‘If it hadn’t been for the fucking luck he never would have got wound up in this latest thing, you know. It shits me.’ ‘So what’s the story?’ ‘You don’t want to know the complete ins and outs of it, kid. Suffice to say he’s in deep shit. Seems to have managed to piss the local bikies off, big time. He’s been trying to sell shit he’s got no right to sell.’ ‘That explains the dog thing as well?’ ‘Yeah, I think so. I’d say so.’ ‘Poor Alice.’ ‘Who?’ 102
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‘The old black and white kelpie.’ ‘Oh. Yeah. Well, she’s all right. She’s been around for centuries that old dog. Plenty of lives left in her yet.’ ‘So, what now?’ ‘Well, Bob’s gotta sort it out. I’m not getting any further into it than I already am, I swear to God.’ Nola swirls the claret around in the bottom of the glass. Puts it down. Picks up the Dunhills. ‘He’ll be back on his feet soon enough. He’s old enough, ugly enough. All that.’ ‘Will he have to sell the roadhouse?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘He’ll probably have to, hey?’ ‘He’ll probably have to do whatever them cunts tell him to do. That’s the thing.’ ‘It makes you wonder about the accident.’ ‘Yeah, well. I’m not wondering about it. Not since he spilled the beans on being in the shit with those dickheads. I know them. I used to be married to one of them. They’re a bunch of arseholes, man. There’s no such thing as an accident where those blokes are concerned.’
Diana dreams about dust clouds coming toward Wilcannia in a low red flock. There are doors and windows being shut all over town and then the sound of sand particles against glass as she places her face up close to the outside. Dust gives colour to the shape of the wind, seeping in, settling in, heavy. Now it blows away to reveal a furrow. It’s a road 103
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at first, but then a worry line on somebody’s forehead, now a creek, used syringes floating on the current like cut logs on their way to the sawmill. She dreams of hands, beautiful hands, and a brown torso in a short red sequined skirt and bra top. She can feel hair plastered to her face in the rain. Running. And then she just lies awake. It’s hot. She listens to small marsupials and lizards scurrying through the homestead. They seem to head straight for the kitchen and bathroom, in search of water. She hears small feet tapping against the shower tiles and along the aluminium corrugations beside the kitchen sink. She needs to get up to urinate all the time, only to find a soft, weak trickle, barely anything. A blue-tongue takes to loitering in the toilet. She adjusts to its sly bent body as a feature in the corner, near the bent up edges of blue lino. The lizard’s back is full of kangaroo ticks. One night, after midnight, wakefulness has her standing on the homestead verandah. She hears the door to Bob’s on-site van creaking, and a night owl calling. Boobook. Boo-book. Standing there, drowsy, she remembers the woman with the short red sequined skirt. It’s Tash, she realises, with an awful clarity. Tash is the woman she had seen all those weeks ago visiting Bob’s van. Tash and Bob. Something is going on. One of the dogs starts to bark and Diana retreats to the shelter of her room. And still sleep does not come easily. Sometimes a cool change sweeps across from the south-east through the darkness and Diana opens the old house up and feels the breeze 104
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against her skin. She can’t get rid of this sense of waiting, leaning at the edge of a doorframe or at the entrance to a hallway. It’s like an ongoing nausea. In the rusty old bathroom cupboard she looks through ancient toiletries for anything that might help her sleep. She finds old Vaseline jars, Canestan cream for thrush, and a dusty packet of tampons. Tampons. Her heart sinks to her stomach. Oh God. How long since she last bled?
Australia Day is approaching and Bob, in his unflappable optimism, decides it would cheer everybody up if they were to throw a party. The first inkling Diana has of it is when Charlie Black arrives with a ute-load of kegs. Bob is soon leaning on his crutches over at the old house, directing Charlie about where to set them up and, later in the afternoon, a whole mob of Bob’s drinking buddies turn up. By dusk, the carpark is virtually full. ‘You might as well knock off, Di. Close up.’ Ian O’Grady has booked a stripper from Brisbane and Tojo Marsh has driven her out. Bob’s had someone hang an Australian flag up between the peppertree and the verandah. They’ve switched off the AMPOL sign and switched on blue bulbs hung in loops around the parking area and roadhouse building. Kenny Fat has brought his DJ set-up from Cobar and it’s like a live jukebox: you just have to yell out your request loud enough for him to hear over the top of everything. 105
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Diana doesn’t like Kenny Fat’s taste in music and the stripper turns out to be the little sister of a girl she went to school with. Diana walks in and out of the back door of the restaurant half the night, delivering sausages, steaks and onions, plates and cutlery and condiments to the barbecue area. Nola balances helping Di with the food and skulling Jim Beams between cones. At one point Diana glances from the kitchen toward the front of the restaurant and sees a bright pink stuffed donkey set up at the counter, drinking with a straw from a can of Coke. ‘Bloody jokers.’ She forces a smile. It’s just like the stuffed toys that used to hang up on hooks at the Dubbo Show. Outside, the music is getting even worse. Blondie. The Eagles. The Carpenters. ‘Who’s drunk all me Jim Beam?’ Con Sweet F.A. pulls up with a bag of Looney Tunes birthday-party masks and starts handing them out. They’re meant for children. Most people’s faces are way too big, so there are sideburns around Tweety Bird’s yellow grin, and double chins beneath Elmer Fudd’s rosy round nose. Porky Pig does that square-elbowed clapping, like at the beginning of his show. Tweety humps Sylvester from behind. The pre-cut eyes are too close together and Diana has to look slightly cross-eyed just to see out. Her breath is wet against the close plastic. She’s relieved when the thin elastic strap snaps and her Roadrunner face falls into the dirt. 106
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Somehow she’s finding it hard to get drunk, even though she’s already drunk too much. Later she stands on the verandah outside her room and looks out at the night sky. The stars are flickering and she can hear Bob giving someone tips about trotting. ‘God, don’t listen to him,’ she mumbles. ‘Oh, you’re a fucking doll, Di, I swear.’ It’s Nola’s husband, Charlie Black. ‘Isn’t she though, Con, eh?’ ‘That young fella, he good to ya, darlin’?’ ‘He’s all right.’ She moves Charlie Black’s hand off her arse as they watch a small hatchback pull up in the carpark. It looks like a small insect in amongst all the rigs. ‘He’s better than most of you bastards.’ There’s laughter. Two car doors slam. ‘She’s a fuckin’ cheeky bitch this one, eh?’ ‘Nah, that’s what I like about you, Di. Tough as they come darlin’. A real fuckin’ trooper.’ There are two figures coming toward the house. ‘Who’s that?’ ‘I dunno.’ Diana moves away from the verandah, her shoes stirring up the dust. She’s trying to walk in the direction of the Suzuki but it doesn’t seem to be getting any closer and she finds spinifex scratching at her calves. It’s hard to see, this far away from the light. She hears a voice she recognises. 107
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‘Hardly recognised the place.’ ‘Yeah, we’re having a bit of a do.’ ‘You switched the AMPOL sign off.’ ‘Yeah.’ Things turn sort of hazy for a moment. There’s a tilting. Faces blurring. Voices slowing down. She’d swear that little white hatchback was familiar. She’d swear that. Where did it go? Her legs are weak. She has to sit down. Who put that donkey on the restaurant stool, anyway? Somehow a whole bunch of bright pink stuffed donkeys are entering her head, climbing down out of trucks, lining up for meals and she’s serving them steak and onions and emptying their ashtrays and holding onto their dicks while they piss into the piss trough. ‘Eeee-awe, eee-awe,’ they’re saying. ‘Eeee-awe, eee-awe.’ She’s down on her hands and knees cleaning out the piss trough. The whole thing just goes on and on. She can feel the dirt sticking to her legs. Cold sweat. Maybe she’s going to vomit. The best thing would be to vomit. She lowers her head. Grips a tuft of grass in her fist. What happened to the little hatchback. Was it white? ‘Nic?’ she’s calling out into the grassland. ‘Is that you, Nic?’ And after a while she’s just lying against the warm ground, noticing how a blade of dry grass tickles her cheek every time she breathes out. It seems quite possible that she’s never going to stand up again, and maybe this piece of grass that’s scratching her will be scratching her forever. 108
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And maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe none of it matters because it’s all very simple. All you have to do is close your eyes and then you can be happy.
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6 t’s a Tuesday, a few days after Australia Day, and Nola’s just finished washing Bob’s clothes and sheets and she’s hung everything out on the clothes line beside his caravan. She’s also got him into the shower block on a chair and out again. The whole thing’s taken her maybe three hours. That’s about how long she’s been up. Now it’s eleven a.m. and Nola’s got the VB out and she’s sat down on the stool in front of Diana. She doesn’t look at all affected by the litre of Jim Beam she consumed the night before. ‘Come round here and show us your feet, darlin’,’ she’s saying. ‘What for?’ ‘Well, they reckon if you’ve got big feet, you’ve got a good, well, you know, a good-sized pelvis … plenty of space for the baby’s head to come out through.’
I
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‘Is that one of those bullshit rumours like that black men have big dicks?’ ‘Well, dunno about that. Not in my experience. Who told you that?’ Diana watches a big blue rig pull up off the road. It has ‘Chris Taylor — Dapto NSW’ written in faded white print on the door. Looks like Chris Taylor’s son Nobby is climbing down out of it. It’s three weeks since Andy last dropped by — not since they sat in his rig in the carpark that time. Diana looks up every time she catches the glint of a blue rig pulling off the highway, but it’s never his. She recalls the family they watched in the carpark all those weeks ago and how those three kids ran circles around the station wagon, imitating their dad. She recalls an odd sense of desperation to the whole scene, or maybe, in hindsight, just a sense of loss. ‘Nah, I’m serious though, darl,’ Nola is saying. ‘Come round here and show us your feet.’ Diana looks down at her own feet enclosed in their scuffed black eight-hole Docs. ‘I can see them myself from here, Nola. They’re small feet.’ ‘Something wrong eh, Di?’ ‘No. Why?’ Nola pulls a face and shrugs. Later in the day, tying up the plastic bin liners, Diana feels her stomach heave and a series of dry retches take hold of her. She doubles over and tries to catch her breath, 111
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and finds herself leaning forward, spitting foul-tasting bile into her hand. She steadies herself against a cupboard door, feels the back room buckle, a cold sweat rising across her forehead. Resting one side of her face against the chilled metal surface of the cool room helps. Steadying, steadying. It’s all the alcohol, perhaps, a three-day hangover. It wouldn’t surprise her if somebody had spiked her drink at that party as well. After a few minutes, she feels ready to stand and she gets on with the clean up, lining up full garbage bags at the kitchen door and refilling the mop bucket. But there remains a dull knotting in her stomach. She feels it beneath her breath during conversation, and notices the flow-on effect — a pain in the back of her neck. She’s so conscious of the nausea, she can’t get it out of her mind. That evening, Nola comes good with a pink floral cardboard packet. She holds it out across the restaurant counter, as if this were the passing across of any old thing — a cigarette, a Mars bar, a five-dollar note. ‘It’s a pregnancy test, darl. Just piss on the stick and get on with finding out, one way or the other.’ Why is packaged women’s business always pastel, Diana wonders, always floral? The ideal colour of us, the ideal shape? Something about passivity, perhaps. Something about our being looked at: the sweet flowering uterus. She turns the packet over. The use-by date has already expired. Diana doesn’t even bother going back to her own bathroom. And so it is in the public toilets that she tears the cellophane off and pulls out the instruction leaflet. 112
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Worried about a missed period? Give yourself peace of mind. She leaves the plastic test strip in its hygienically-sealed wrapper and places it precariously on the edge of the metal sink, for a moment, teetering. What’s it going to confirm, anyway? Trouble ahead? For a few minutes she is picking at her fingernails. Then she looks at her reflection in the mirror. There are shadows underneath her eyes. Who is this girl in the mirror, she wonders, and what is it that she wants? Diana shuts her eyes and feels the closeness of Andy West, a comforting but fleeting sensation. She unwraps the tester and takes it into the cubicle, pisses onto the test strip. Even before the mandatory two minutes is up, a blue stripe has appeared. It’s positive. THIS TEST HAS AN ACCURACY RATE OF 86%. SEE YOUR DOCTOR. Diana breathes out with a long soft whistle. How many weeks since she left Sydney? She’s counting back through all of January, most of December. She hasn’t bled since November. That’s ten or eleven weeks ago, now … It’s Andy’s … It has to be … Is it seven or eight weeks since she watched him climb down from his rig that first time, he in his dirty yellow shirt and the two of them watching each other over the top of that laminex counter? She slouches back against the toilet cistern, shuts her eyes and is reminded of her own mother, the way Audrey would slump, drunk, in a hotel lounge chair, or against the balustrade on her own verandah in that pink dressinggown she had. Diana recalls the blue and silver label on the 113
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gin bottle, the lined face, the tired eyes. Pregnant, a mother-to-be. Please, God, don’t let it be a disaster.
‘Have you ever fucked up, Nola? I mean really fucked up?’ ‘’Course I have. Hasn’t everyone?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘You wanna tell me about it?’ ‘I dunno.’ She rests her hands on her stomach. Nola offers her a cigarette. ‘Thanks.’ There’s an ashtray overflowing on to the counter top. ‘I had this friend in Sydney. She had a problem, you know, with smack. It got bad.’ ‘You can’t feel guilty about that, Di. Everyone has their choices to make.’ ‘I know, I know, it’s just that I upped and left her, you know. She’d overdosed and she was in my car. I was supposed to be driving her back to her boyfriend’s house and she passed out.’ ‘It’s not your fault, Di.’ ‘It’s more complicated than that. I was, well, we’d been, the two of us … oh God, I don’t know if I should tell you … the point is, I ran into a power pole.’ ‘And …?’ ‘I was in love with her.’ Nola leans back and pulls a face. 114
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‘Don’t turn on me now, Di.’ ‘No, no, listen, I’m not a dyke.’ ‘She’d overdosed …’ says Nola. ‘She’d overdosed,’ says Diana, ‘and I didn’t notice, I was just talking at her, I was telling her stuff, just getting it off my chest, and I thought she’d gone all quiet because of what I was saying, but then I realised and I looked at her, but we were taking a corner too fast and she fell on me like a corpse. I jumped out my skin. The car, the rain, we skidded across the road, we slammed right into the power pole. Nicole was … she was half on the bonnet, her legs were caught somehow under the dash. I just got out. There was blood. I spewed into the gutter. And then I bolted. I left her there, she was … I don’t know.’ ‘So she was dead, your friend was dead?’ ‘I don’t know. You’re the bloody clairvoyant. You tell me.’ ‘Jesus, I don’t know.’ ‘The woman following me around?’ ‘What?’ ‘The one you told me about, you could see her in my shadow.’ ‘Oh, no, that woman in your shadow, she’s old. Real old, or just real haggard. Sad looking, too. Someone else all together, I reckon. Maybe someone you don’t know about yet.’ ‘Hey?’ ‘Oh. No. Look, I don’t know anything about this young one.’ 115
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Diana’s stomach is making noises. Nola takes her by the wrist. ‘Look, I don’t know about your friend. I’m sorry. Can’t you just phone somebody up and find out, for Christ’s sake? Hasn’t she got a family you could ask? I don’t know, youse young kids, you just go beatin’ around the fucking bush. Get on with it, you know what I’m saying? Don’t torture yourself. Just get onto someone and find out.’
From a distance, a big group of bikes sounds a bit like a swarm of bees, especially when you’re out in the middle of nowhere. Diana hears them coming a long time before they arrive. Soon they’re here, gleaming Jap bikes in threes and fours all lined up around the bowsers, well away from the trucks. Inside, the place is full of the Newcastle mob who’ve ridden almost two and a half thousand kilometres raising money for kids with cancer. There are men and women, old and young. A couple of little kids who’ve been travelling in a sidecar. They’re all talking about a benefit gig in Broken Hill they’ve been too. Who got so drunk they fell off their chair. Who loves tequila. ‘Geez, you’ve pulled up all right, Barnsie.’ Maria, a blonde plumber from The Entrance, wants to know if Diana’s got her bike licence, whether she’s worked there long, whether she wants to take a ride some time. 116
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‘I’ll come out and pick you up next time we do a Broken Hill run. You’ll love it.’ ‘Oh yeah?’ The woman’s all butch. Diana turns away toward the deep fryer. Fills another bucket of chips. Bob appears on his crutches at the back door to the kitchen. ‘Jesus, they had me worried for a bit, this mob,’ he says in a low voice. ‘Nearly shit yourself, Bob?’ ‘You’re not wrong. Thought they were the real thing.’
The Greyhound driver climbs down to the roadside, pulling up his shorts and tugging open the cigarette packet in his breast pocket. He waves at Diana. She waves back. A couple of the passengers on board the coach stir in their seats. One guy gets off and lights up. ‘It’ll have to be a quick one, mate,’ says the driver, nodding at Bob and Nola, who appear in the restaurant doorway with Nola’s little case at the ready. ‘Alright, see ya, bro.’ ‘Yeah, righto.’ ‘You too, darlin’.’ ‘Bye Nola.’ Diana smiles. She’ll miss Nola now, even though she’s a bloody alcoholic. ‘Look after yourself, darlin’. Don’t do anything stupid.’ ‘I’ll try not to.’ 117
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As if she hadn’t already. The driver holds his lit ciggie between his lips while he opens the luggage compartment and puts Nola’s case in. ‘I see Bob’s got the place up for sale, Nola,’ says the driver, nodding at the new red and white Elders sign beside the bowsers. ‘That’s it.’ He nods knowingly, tucking his crisp white shirt into his shorts again. ‘How long ’til the next smoko, boss?’ says the stray passenger. ‘Oh, it’ll be a good three hours from here, mate.’ ‘Shit, eh.’ The driver’s already climbed aboard again, sitting straight-backed in his seat. The engine’s running. Nola disappears into the darkly carpeted coach, smiling a little, much like the first time Diana ever saw her.
Andy doesn’t call in. He just doesn’t call in. She has thought of any number of possible excuses for him. His mother, for example, he said she had a problem, didn’t he? Maybe she’s ill. Or maybe Andy himself is ill. Or maybe he’s taken time off. Early morning and late afternoon Diana walks up and down along the highway edge, looping back and around the motley set of buildings, her eyes on the road. She can taste him, the sweet salty taste of him, still in her mouth after all 118
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these weeks. If she tries hard enough, she thinks, maybe she could will the blue metallic rig to appear over the horizon. But it’s hot. It’s too hot. And there’s no breeze. The sky is too big, out here. Sometimes she consoles herself with the fact that she hasn’t sighted Andy West’s rig at all. It would be worse if she had seen it drive past. It would be worse to know for sure that he’d chosen not to stop.
It’s only the day after Nola’s gone that a cop car pulls up and two burly young coppers get out, pulling their already tight trousers up even higher above their hips. They don their rigid caps. ‘Oh Christ, here we go,’ says Bob, looking desperate and making himself busy by sinking a basket of chips, not that they have the orders to warrant it. The restaurant door closes behind the two blue uniforms, and Diana forces a smile. ‘G’day.’ ‘G’day.’ One of them is the same fella who’d stopped in back in December. He nods at her but she fails to acknowledge his recognition. ‘What can I get youse?’ ‘Oh, a steak sandwich, thanks,’ answers the older cop, helping himself to a Coke can from the fridge. ‘And, um, I’ll just have a pie,’ says the other. ‘Do you want sauce with that?’ 119
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‘Yeah, thanks.’ Diana glances across at her boss, who is braving the front counter now, and leaning forward on his elbows. ‘Just here for the feed, boys, or is there something else I can help youse with?’ Bob is all congenial, rosy, soft. ‘Ah, a bit of both actually, mate. Bob, isn’t it; you’re the proprietor here, right?’ ‘Yeah, that’s right. Sure. Bob Davies. And you?’ ‘Ah, I’m Detective Sergeant Michael Rollins, from Nyngan, and this is, well, I think you’ve met Officer Peters before, used to hail from Cobar?’ ‘Oh, yeah, seen you around, yeah.’ ‘G’day.’ Bob comes around the front of the counter, and shakes hands with the two men. The detective clears his throat. ‘Look, there’s a couple of things we’d like to ask you about, Bob. Have you got a little private office or something here, mate, we could have a little chat?’ he says, acknowledging the customer further along the counter, whose face has lowered conspicuously further into his Penthouse magazine. The colour has drained from Bob’s face a little. ‘Sure, yeah, no worries. Yeah, come through. Di’ll bring your orders in for you, won’t you, mate?’ She nods. Bob shuts the office door behind him and Diana finds herself staring at the closed door. It’s blue and scuffed and she’s never seen it shut before. She imagines a decade’s worth 120
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of spiders’ webs, once harboured in the safe crevice between wall and open door, torn down with that single foul swing. She assembles the detective’s steak sandwich on a chipped plate, considers doing something awful to it, but checks herself, then takes time to make sure the young copper’s pie is hot enough before ferrying both plates toward the blue door. She knocks. ‘Come in, Di.’ Whatever discussion had been going on before stops while she hands the boys in uniform their plates and cutlery. The fella with the pie has to eat standing up, there being only one other chair in the little room aside from Bob’s. She hovers for a moment, wondering whether this state of things is satisfactory. ‘Can I get you a chair?’ ‘Nah, it’s okay,’ says the young copper, hot mince already dribbling down his chin. He sets the plate down on top of Bob’s filing cabinet. Diana flashes a quick look at Bob in an attempt to try to read the severity of the situation. He stares back at her blankly. She shuts the door behind her. It could be anything. It could be anything at all, she tells herself. She moves to shuffle another box of frozen chips out of the cool room, just to keep herself busy. The cardboard is rock-hard and cold against her hands. She puts it down on the counter, and reaches for one of her cigarettes from beneath the till. 121
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Diana is standing at the back door with the screen half open and about to light up when she hears him. ‘Di?’ ‘Hey?’ Bob is up close behind her all of a sudden, speaking into her ear. ‘Ah, these two want to have a bit of a word with you, darlin’.’ ‘With me?’ He nods and breathes in, as if about to say something else, but changing his mind at the last minute. He motions her toward the closed blue door and doesn’t follow her in.
‘Diana Kooper?’ Diana hesitates. ‘Yes.’ ‘Not Diana Stewart then?’ ‘Hey?’ ‘Have you got any ID on ya, love?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ She shrugs. ‘How long you been working here for?’ She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. Whatever they’ve got on her, it doesn’t matter. She’s got the right to say nothing. She’s got that much, at least. ‘All right, you don’t have to say nothing. Point is, we’re 122
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here to deliver a summons. Seems like you were in a bit of trouble in the big smoke. You’re supposed to make an appearance in the Local Court in Newtown on the tenth of February. We thought you might like to know about it.’ ‘What for? What’s it for?’ ‘Traffic offences. There’s a list as long as me arm. Using a dangerously defective vehicle on the road; using an unregistered vehicle on the road; driving recklessly in a manner dangerous; driving recklessly at a speed dangerous; driving with one unrestrained passenger; failure to stop and give assistance in an accident involving death or injury.’ ‘Death or injury?’ ‘That’s just the title of the offence. An accident involving death or injury.’ ‘She was unconscious before I even took the corner.’ ‘Yeah, well, you can tell that to the court,’ the young fella frowns, probably quite sympathetically, as he hands her the piece of paper. ‘February ten. You got three days to get to Sydney.’ Diana goes cold. She wants to ask them about Nicole, but something won’t let her give them the satisfaction. Maybe Nola was right. Beating around the bush. Making it hard for herself. Still. She won’t ask. Not these two.
‘Jesus, Di. Thought my luck had really fucking twisted. Turns out to be all about you.’ ‘Yeah. My luck.’ 123
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‘Doesn’t bother me, mate, I tell ya, whatever you’ve done. I don’t expect a blow-in like you to be squeaky clean, for God’s sake. Everyone’s got their secrets. Nothing wrong with you. You’re a good worker, Di. A bloody good worker. You’re a good kid.’ ‘A good kid, yeah, right. Never gets you anywhere.’ ‘You think I’ve never done the bolt? I’m a fucking chronic gambler, Di. Christ, I’ve done the bolt a million times. But when you get a bit older, you start to realise, it doesn’t do nothing for ya, just pissing off, just fucking running. All that happens is you come face to face with your own shit, travelling the other way. You’ve gotta persevere, you know. Use your brain. Stick out the hard stuff. You think I’d still be sitting here like a lame duck, if I thought taking off somewhere else was gonna solve me problems? You just gotta stick it out, that’s the one thing I’ve learned in my time.’ ‘Yeah, well, maybe you’re full of shit, Bob.’
Walking along the edge of the road doesn’t help. She feels like taking off. She really does. All that happens is you come face to face with your own shit, travelling the other way. Crude bastard. If he’d pay her the wages he owes her, at least hitting the road would be an option. No. She isn’t going anywhere. She lies back on the old mattress and stares at the water-stained ceiling. Maybe she dozes for a while. When 124
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she opens her eyes she can hear the blue-tongue lizard scraping along the lino, and bumping its head against the rotten old skirting boards. She turns over and imagines Andy West’s body beside her, the weight of him, that long back and the little row of scars. She moves a lump of sheet closer over his side, padding it up with blanket to better resemble his shape. Stretching out along the length of the bed, she reaches a hand across to him, and imagines his smooth skin beneath her palm. She touches herself, moving three fingers in small circles and feeling an ache. ‘Andy,’ she whispers, and she moves and shudders against the firm press of her own hand.
‘Di? Di? Come on, Di. I know you’re in there.’ It would have been better if she had just said nothing, just lain there. The voice would have gone away eventually. In fact, she had attempted a small silence, leaning back on her pillow and listening to the rattle of the door handle. There was a short sigh, then an ongoing tapping. ‘Di?’ Finally, she couldn’t help herself. ‘Fuck off, Nic.’ ‘Come on, Di. What’s up?’ ‘Why don’t you go and find someone else to rip off?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘You know what I mean.’ 125
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‘What’s wrong? Come on, let me in, Di. Please?’ The door to Diana’s King Street bed-sit was pink, the paint chipped. She threw a cushion at it, producing a dull thumping sound followed by a soft whistle as the polyester cover slid down toward the floor. ‘So, where’d you take it all to, Nic?’ Diana raised her voice to the ceiling. ‘What was it worth to you?’ There was no answer. She could feel bitterness rising in her throat. ‘What am I supposed to do now? You want me to go down to the fucking pawn shop and buy back my own stuff just so you can come and rip me off again?’ Silence. A shifting of weight. The sliding of cloth against the door. Then, again: tap, tap. ‘Di?’ A low, childish whisper. ‘Don’t shut me out, Di, please, I need you.’ Something compelled Diana Kooper — a blinding extravagance of will. She rose up from her spot on the futon and moved toward the closed door. The movement seemed to stretch out momentarily, as if offering the chance to change her mind, to sit down again, to forget. But she did none of these things, instead opening the door with a swish. A body lurched forward but Diana was ready for it. Her fist landed quickly on the soft hollow of Nicole’s temple. The girl fell and Diana was on top of her, pinning her by the shoulders to the filthy carpet. She knocked the 126
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head against the floor, hard. Soon she was aware only of sounds: fabric tearing and the soft whoosh of her friend’s breath beneath shawls of hair. ‘You fucking bitch.’ Diana discovered a vital physical strength fed by rage and despair. But Nicole Clarke fought back, so that Diana too was flung against the furniture legs, against the floor, against a sharp corner of the low bed. Blood swam from their noses and skin burnt at hips, knees, elbows. They knocked into an open cupboard door, sprinkling empty containers and food packaging across the stained floor. They were using knuckles, boots, wrangles, pinches. They were tripping each other up, wedging grit and splinters and skin beneath short fingernails. Wrestling gave way briefly to a round of boxing. They were up on their feet. Diana could picture the kids practising in the warehouse near their old place in Glebe. Maybe Nicole could see them too. For a moment the girls were fenced in by thick red ropes. They had bright silk shorts on. Diana could feel her right fist clenched at her side, burning to lodge a lethal knock. She was raking up stray instructions from the schoolyard: Go for the soft temple / Avoid the jaw / Form the fist right / Dance! Dance on your feet. Finally Diana’s bare fist made sharp contact with an eye, flinging the other girl back. Nicole stumbled and held one hand across her damaged eyelid, trying to refocus. Diana smirked, too pleased with herself. But she had only glanced away momentarily when she felt something land 127
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with force against her own gut. Suddenly the wind was gone from her. Breathing is life. Life is breathing. She folded forward and fell. The world blackened. When she came to there was an acrid smell of hot metal. The electric kettle had boiled dry. There was a pillow beneath her head, and the familiar shape of Nicole Clarke sprawled out on the bed beside her. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. All that effort, for nothing. The body beside her moaned in response. Diana got up and turned off the kettle.
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7 iana Kooper had coined the term Big Change Trouble when she was small. It was something she reckoned she could sense early, before others got a whiff of it. It was the kind of trouble she had watched her mother trying to dodge at the last minute, the way drivers who speed are forced to dodge sudden obstacles on the road, without much success. When she was a kid, Big Change Trouble meant the convergence of all number of small trouble things — things to do with her mother’s drinking, things to do with money, or things to do with school. It started with little ruptures right across all the stuff she’d gotten used to. Sometimes it was like she was outside of herself, looking down, watching it happen, and always this sense that nobody else could make it out quite like she could. Just before she did the bolt from Sydney, Diana could sense that eerie childhood feeling, so rotten, so familiar.
D
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It rose up the day after she and Nicole had beat the shit out of each other. She went to work, as usual, in the bar in Redfern. She was on the late afternoon shift. Her limbs were tired and sore. Dick Richards, the guy who always gave her good, reliable tips, stood at the bar rubbing his hand across his left nipple and saying ‘Caaaw,’ widening his eyes and blinking. She got an odd feeling, watching the way his T-shirt creased beneath his hand as he rubbed. Maybe he was actually having a heart attack, right there at the bar. She felt removed from him, on edge, and did nothing to help him. She was more concerned that there was something wrong with one of her work shoes. The rubber sole was coming off at the front, and it was flip-flapping around, getting stuck on the edges of the bar mats. Twice she nearly tripped carrying two full schooners of Resch’s. Later one of the other regulars, Marty Miller, told her about how he had to walk home all the way from St Peters the previous afternoon, because he had these three boils on his arse and they had burst, and even though one of his mates went by and offered him a lift, he didn’t want to get in. He didn’t want to make a mess on his mate’s seat. It was so bad, he wouldn’t even have gotten into a taxi. It was about six kilometres he had to walk. He was the nicest guy, Marty, but he didn’t generally talk too much, it was unlike him even to be standing at the bar. Usually he drank over by the window, looking out at the street. Diana was left wondering about him, long after he’d gone home. Marty Miller and the boils 130
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on his arse, the blood and pus leaking down his legs as he walked. Why did he have to tell her about it? That night Jeff Fenech was due to defend his WBC Featherweight Title. Sky Channel was broadcasting it live. Gradually the place filled up and soon there wasn’t a punter in the whole pub who wasn’t barracking for Fenech. It was dead busy. Diana’s boss, Michael, was completely stoned. He kept smiling sympathetically and pointing at the bruises on her face and shaking his head, but he was smiling from the wrong side of the bar. There should have been two of them serving. It was annoying. Beryl and Matt’s two kids came in again, six and eight years old, and Diana had to keep her eyes on them as they pushed their way through the crowd to find Mum and Dad at their usual spot in front of the card machines. Probably just asking for money for a feed, poor buggers, but they weren’t supposed to come into the pub, especially at night, especially in a big crowd like this. She lost track of them, couldn’t tell if they’d already gone or not. Big Change Trouble gives a certain flavour to everything. It might as well have been in the beer itself, the yeasty scent of it filling the room every time a drinker exhaled. Jeff Fenech went to twelve rounds with the tiny little Mexican, Mario Martinez. It was a long, monotonous fight with barely any drama in it. Jeff wasn’t at his best. ‘His hands are fucked,’ people were saying. ‘His fucking hands are ratshit.’ There’d been too many fractures, too many punches over too many years. It was difficult to 131
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watch. Everybody sensed the champion’s reign was close to being over. Jeff won the fight, but it wasn’t with anything you could call style. The pub emptied out quickly after that. It was like someone had just taken a giant scoop out of the place, and everybody was gone, even Dick Richards. She put up the stools, wiped down the bar, emptied the flat amber fluid out of the trays. Outside she watched two taxis go past with their ‘Engaged’ signs up, even though there was no one but the drivers in them. A dozen mounted police turned out of Raglan Street and she could hear the sound of their horses’ hooves against the blacktop, the clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop ricocheting up and down the length of near-empty Botany Road. Diana’s little Suzuki coughed to a start and she drove home the back way through this odd disquiet, sensing something looming just beneath the surface. When she got to the laneway behind her King Street bed-sit, she was met by the figure of Nicole Clarke walking into the stream of her headlights. Nicole held up a limp hand, shielding her face from the light. ‘What?’ ‘You gotta help me, Di. I want to get clean.’ She seemed thinner than ever, her hair all flat. Diana had given her a corker of a black eye and it shone in the streetlight, swollen. ‘I want to give it a go, I mean it, really,’ she said through the open driver’s window. ‘I’ve got to stay away from Harry.’ 132
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She followed Diana up the stairs. ‘You’ve got to help me keep away from him, Di. We’re bad for each other.’
Nicole was going to move out of Harry’s place in Bondi and find a place of her own. She was going to work two jobs and save to go to a private college, do a course in natural medicine. Diana could tell she’d had a hit not long before she arrived. Her friend sat at the table, flicking her hair back out of her eyes and doodling on an old telephone bill. They went to sleep a little after one, but Diana slept lightly. At seven, Nicole was up and getting restless, wandering in small loops around the tiny space. Diana tried to sleep on, raising an eyelid occasionally to see Nicole hunched over, biting her nails, staring out into space. They ate blueberry yoghurt for breakfast, sharing the same spoon, eating straight out of the tub. Diana was supposed to be at TAFE that morning, to see about a supplementary exam. And she was due to start her shift at The Royal at two. But she was afraid to leave. If she left, Nicole might go out. If Nicole went out, that would be the end of it. ‘You must hate me,’ Nicole said sulkily. ‘Yes and no.’ The bed-sit had very little in it. The old blue fridge rumbled and buzzed. Nicole had already stolen the stereo, the television, the microwave, even the little dual-ring gas 133
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cooktop. It had taken Diana years to accumulate that stuff. Now there were two folding chairs beside a fold-out table. There was the futon. Diana shared the bathroom down the hall with Bernie and Wanda, the drag queens in the next room. The tiny bed-sit’s best feature was a set of French doors opening out on to a railing and overlooking the busy road below. The breeze, or sometimes just the hot air created by the ceaseless traffic, made the red curtains above the doorway dance and sway. The girls sat watching this dance for most of the morning. Funny the way the fabric lifted, ballooned, and then fell. Lifted, ballooned, then fell. There was something in it. And yet, also, there was nothing. Soon Nicole Clarke’s stomach would knot into a long, sharp cramp. They played Scrabble. Diana made a triple word score with ‘ZOO’. Nicole’s nose started to run. She used the ‘O’ at the end of ‘ZOO’ to run the word ‘HOLLOW’ along the vertical edge of the board. ‘It’s all turned to shit,’ she said. ‘Everything I’ve ever done. It’s all turned to shit.’ Diana found it difficult to be patient. It was five past two. She wanted to go out for a walk, at least get some fresh air. ‘It would be easier if we could just veg out in front of the TV,’ she said. But there wasn’t one. Nicole’s stomach started to grumble. ‘I’m starting to get the kicking disease,’ she said and stood up, rubbing her back, lifting her feet up onto the chair, rubbing her calves. She circled the room. ‘I hope the queens next door are not going to be wanting the bathroom too much tonight.’ 134
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Nicole was smiling, as if twitching legs and a rumbling stomach were something to be proud of. It was progress, of sorts, Diana supposed, but she was quietly angry. There was still that sense of irreversible change looming, that uncomfortable déjà vu, and it made her almost as fidgety as the junkie herself. It was almost as if she didn’t want Nicole to get through it, to become normal again. She pushed the thought away. Nicole was walking up and down, looping. ‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘You have control. Not like me. I have to push everything to the limit. You’re lucky. You know when to stop.’ Diana sighed. ‘Harry reckons it all goes back to childhood, you know?’ ‘What would he know about childhood?’ ‘He had it tough. Sure, they weren’t exactly poor, but he had his own problems, you know?’ ‘Yeah, whatever you reckon.’ ‘I know what my problem is. I just don’t like myself. Sometimes I really hate myself, you know?’ ‘I wish I knew how to help you better, Nic.’ ‘You? You just make me feel guilty as well.’ Diana looks away. The afternoon carries on in this manner. They don’t eat. The room gets smaller and smaller. Nicole goes out to the bathroom, clutching her stomach. Nothing happens. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours. 135
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‘If you’d just let me know you were coming to do this here, Nic,’ she said, ‘I could have stocked up on a few things. Some stuff to read. Some food. Panadol.’ ‘I’m not hungry.’ Eventually Nicole lay down on the futon, curling herself up to face the wall, and Diana let her gaze rest on her friend’s back, the gentle curve of it. It was the same back she’d known all this time, a long spine, broad shoulders. The torso had some nice curves to it, sensual curves. Nicole had big tits, narrow hips. The guys loved that. It was the same olive skin, too, still a beautiful colour, and remarkably clear, though perhaps not as glowing as it used to be. It was the hair that really showed Nicole’s poor health now. It used to be full, thick and curly. Now it fell limp and greasy, long past the need for a decent cut. ‘How long since we cut each other’s hair?’ ‘Do you know what, Di?’ ‘What?’ ‘I don’t know if I can stick it out.’ ‘Yes, you can. You can.’ ‘No. I don’t think so.’ That’s when it started to rain. The noise level rose. There was the sound of gushing water and car tyres against wet tar. It was Sydney rain, summer rain, bucketing down with passion. Later came the sound of water dripping into the kitchen bin near the back corner, where the roof leaked. One girl lay on the futon. The other sat at the table. This was how it was. This was how it was all night 136
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and all the next day. Sometimes the girl on the chair got up and took a fresh bucket to the bedside, sometimes a fresh cloth to wipe down the other girl’s forehead. Sometimes the girl on the futon stood up, then sat down, then stood up again, sat down. Once she got up and went down the hallway, as if to go down to the bathroom. Her friend followed her, took her hand, brought her back to the low bed. ‘Stay here now,’ she said. ‘You can use the bucket.’ Time passed. Later Diana found herself curled up against Nicole’s warm body. She wasn’t tired, but she just felt this need to get close. Nicole smelt like sweat and vomit, but it didn’t matter. ‘Do you always have to latch onto people like that?’ she remembered her mother saying to her when she was small, and they were at the school fence. Diana had hold of the teacher’s leg. Mrs Lunney didn’t seem to mind, but Diana let go. She had to, her mother was yanking at her arm. ‘You shouldn’t grab onto people like that, Diana. How’s Mrs Lunney gonna get on with her life when she’s got some huge ugly leech attached to her leg?’ She could see the pattern her own breath was making in the fine hair on the back of Nicole Clarke’s neck. ‘I think I better call Harry,’ said Nicole, as darkness fell. ‘No. You don’t need to.’ And later: ‘I think you better go to the 7-11, Di. Get us some food and stuff. I’m going to need some Panadol.’ ‘No, it’s okay. We don’t need anything.’ 137
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The fridge hummed. A cockroach appeared on the wall above the bed. ‘I don’t think I can go through with it, Di.’ ‘Yes, you can.’ The clock passed seven, eight, nine. Nicole broke into a fever. Diana slept upright in her chair, which she’d moved across to block the door. Nicole said things Diana couldn’t understand. She was like a dreamer awake. It was nonsense. Diana closed her eyes, and let the groans and the gobbledygook float up into the air. It must have been past two a.m. when she heard Wanda and Bernie arguing in the hall outside. They were calling each other fuckheads. Then later they were laughing and saying ‘ooooohhh’ and ‘eeeuggh’ and ‘fabulous’ in their usual fashion. Nicole lay still, clutching her stomach. She was a low lump, covered in a cotton blanket, sweating and snuffling into the hard futon. Diana’s chair was uncomfortable. She pushed it aside and lay down on the floor. Then she must have drifted off again, because when she woke it had all changed. ‘If this doesn’t work out, that’s it,’ she’d wanted to say earlier, but hadn’t. ‘If you don’t do this now, I’m not going to be here for you the next time.’ She’d failed to say that too. Nicole was next door already. Diana recognised the rise and fall of her voice through the wall and she could hear Bernie sympathising. ‘Oh, darling, of course you are, my God, look at you!’ • • • 138
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That’s how they ended up in the car at half past three in the morning. Diana was driving her back to Harry’s. Diana was being responsible, calm, together. Diana was fine. She was angry with Bernie, that’s all. She was trying to picture Marty Miller and the journey he’d made, all the way from St Peters to downtown Redfern with the burst boils on his arse leaking pus and blood all down his own legs. That was patience. That was perseverance. ‘This is it,’ she wanted to say, or ‘I’ve reached the end with you, Nic.’ But she didn’t say either of those things, though sometimes it felt like she had. Maybe she had said them both, she wasn’t sure. ‘I hope you know that,’ she added. But there was no answer. Diana Kooper was driving fast. She was hungry. And she was very, very tired. The rain was pelting down again, and the sound of it was deafening. There was hardly any traffic. It was a Wednesday morning. Most sensible people were asleep. The windscreen was fogging up, the colour from the traffic lights bled across the road like a smudge. They were nearing the City Road intersection when it happened. Diana looked across to the passenger seat. She’d been too angry to look at Nicole until then. Her friend’s head was bouncing around with the suspension. What had fucking Bernie given her? She looked back at the road. ‘Nicole?’ Diana reached a hand across to try to feel a pulse and that’s when it happened. The girl’s body slid toward her 139
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and, at roughly the same time, the corner arrived. She slammed on the brakes. The car slid. She swerved and braked harder, but the road was slippery and the car just skid faster. There was a fantastic jolt as the little Suzuki slammed straight into the power pole, head on. Diana’s seat belt locked. The front end crumpled. There was glass everywhere and Nicole Clarke was halfway through the windscreen. Diana couldn’t feel anything. She undid her belt, opened the driver door and got out of the car. The rain was heavy. Her hair was stuck to her face. All her limbs had gone cold. She noticed how Nicole’s eyes were open, her forehead resting still against twisted metal. Diana bent forward and vomited into the gutter. She put one foot in front of the other and ventured toward the park. One foot, the other. Her pulse was rapid. Everything was green and black and blurry. That’s because, by then, she was running.
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8 he drivers have always complained about the two blue phones out the front of the restaurant, how they don’t work properly, how the sound of the other person’s voice oscillates between clarity and nothingness, how the machine swallows your money and cuts you off just as the person at the other end picks up. Diana piles in two dollars’ worth of twenty-cent pieces and dials the number in Bondi. It rings. It rings. It rings. ‘Yeah?’ ‘Harry?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘It’s Diana.’ ‘What the fuck do you want?’ She doesn’t know what to say. She says nothing. She can hear Harry breathing out a long breath.
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‘Um,’ Diana stumbles. ‘Is she there?’ ‘What?’ ‘Is Nic there?’ The phone handset slaps against something, probably his kitchen wall. She remembers his kitchen now, the glossy black tiles. She can hear muffled voices in the background. Is Nic really there? Does this mean she’s okay? Diana’s heart rate quickens. She tries to imagine who else might be there at Harry’s flat. There’s movement as someone picks up the handset again. Diana waits. But no one says anything. There is definitely someone there. Diana wants to speak but the words are stuck in her throat. She can hear somebody breathing. ‘Nic?’ she manages, finally. No answer. ‘Nic?’ A muffled laugh. ‘Harry?’ ‘You fucking mad bitch!’ ‘What?’ ‘You’ve got a fucking cheek calling me up. I can’t fucking believe this. You are one fucking mad bitch. You call here again and I’ll track you down, kid. I’ll fucking track you down and throttle you.’ The line goes dead. • • •
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Diana is not going to work in the kitchen. Bob can get fucked if he thinks she’s going to work for nothing. She finds a dusty box of foolscap paper in the back room of the old homestead and spends two days and nights folding and tearing individual sheets until there are scores of little people all in rows, gathered around her in the room. The figures are distorted, genderless, and joined at the hand. The homestead is covered in these little paper people before she remembers other kinds of paper craft from childhood. Boats, planes, water bombs and paper cranes. She makes them all, creeping out of the building only to forage for food at three in the morning in the dark space of the empty roadhouse kitchen. February ten comes and goes. She looks at her face in the rusty bathroom mirror. Her fringe is almost long enough to tuck behind her ears. Her hair needs cutting. She watches a bead of sweat run down her forehead, settling at her cheekbone.
The coins make a dull clink in the blue phone. There are only three rings before a child answers. ‘Hello?’ ‘Hello?’ ‘Um, is this still Auntie Betty Clarke’s number?’ ‘Yeah. But she’s not here.’ ‘Is Nan Farley? Is Nan Farley there?’ ‘Um …’ 143
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There’s a muffled pause as the child yells out, Paula, is Nan Farley here? and someone calls back, Yeah, she’s out the front. Diana smiles. She pictures Nan Farley on the front verandah, sitting there in the same old chair. She waits. The voice, when it comes, is croaky and slow and soothingly familiar. ‘Hello, who is this?’ ‘Nan?’ ‘Who’s this?’ ‘It’s Diana Stewart.’ ‘Diana? Are you all right, love? Where were you? You weren’t there.’ ‘Hey?’ ‘We had the funeral just before Christmas. You didn’t come.’ Diana doesn’t know what to say. She feels her throat swell. ‘Speak up, darl. What is it, love?’ She can’t hang up on Nan Farley, but doesn’t know what else to do. She holds the handset close to her chest, and swallows. ‘Is it long distance?’ she can hear Nan Farley saying. ‘Where are you ringing from, love?’ Her face is wet. ‘Didn’t you know about it, sweetheart?’ Nan Farley’s voice is muffled against Diana’s chest. ‘Darl? Where are you? Why don’t you come home and see us? We’d love to see ya, all of us.’ • • • 144
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‘Di? Di?’ Tap, tap, tap. ‘Come on, mate, you can’t hole yourself up in there forever, you know.’ No answer. ‘Mind if I come in?’ ‘It’s a free country.’ The floorboards creak. ‘Ah, geez, what’s all this paper shit everywhere? You making a bloody tinderbox, or what?’ Diana is sitting on the end of the mattress. She tucks her hair behind her ears and looks up at him as he hovers in the doorway. He must be feeling a bit self-conscious or something. He squats. ‘I could do with some help over in the kitchen, Di. The bloody smallgoods guy, he won’t deliver till I pay up my dues and we’ve run out of pies. Thought you could fix some roast vegies up for us, get the bain-marie all fired up.’ She doesn’t answer. ‘Listen, Di, this mate of mine has a system for the horses, see, all on his home PC, has it all worked out, mathematically, algebra and logarithms and shit. You reckon he’s won anything yet, Di?’ ‘Doubt it.’ ‘Exactly. Well, what he doesn’t know is that life just up and deals you, you know, you can’t operate a system against it. You’ve got to roll with the punches, mate.’ ‘Yeah, thanks, Bob. I’ll remember that.’ 145
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‘Listen, I know I owe you an apology, mate. Things have just got real tough for me lately, you know.’ ‘Oh.’ Bob’s face is unshaven. His eyes are wide and a little desperate. But they are clear eyes, sort of honest-looking eyes. And she feels sorry for him, somehow, even given what she knows about he and Tash. ‘Look, Di, the money’s just been falling through my fingers these last few months. You of all people should know that. The cheques are bouncing left, right and centre. ‘Anyways, you’ve probably sorted it out by now, you’re a lot younger than me, sharper than me, I know that. I thought to myself, if I could just run a little bit of business on the side for a bit, just for a short while, you know. Sort myself out.’ Diana shuts her eyes. ‘Course Nola has to stick her big fat head in, doesn’t she? Fuck knows where she found out, but next minute she’s out here giving me a gutful. Thinks she knows fuckin’ everything. Who’d you get your deal from? Who the fuck did you get it from? She’s bloody screaming at me. ‘She’s a tough bitch, my sister, I tell you. Turns out the fella I got me first bundle from, and I know the bloke, but shit, turns out he’s stolen it from some other mother-fucker. Oh, I tell you what, when you’re on a downward bend sometimes, you know, you have to remind yourself that your luck is gonna turn, at some point, right? You’ve gotta get a fucking break some time. 146
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‘I was doing pretty good, too. No bloody shortage of customers, that’s for sure. Not like I had to put a sign up on the highway, not at all. Keeps the wheels turning, keeps the country moving, the old go-ey, doesn’t it, Di?’ Diana nods. Why’s he telling me all this? she’s thinking. ‘Still, you wouldn’t believe it, would you? Fuckin’ Kenny Fat. You know Kenny? Did the music for us on Australia Day? He’s got some good music, too. Bloody idiot. Turns out he’s flogged two kilos of drugs from the biggest gang of bikies in the country. The man’s got rocks in his head. Or a fuckin’ death wish, I don’t know. ‘That’s what made me nervous, eh? When Nola told me that, I was shitting myself. Anyway, that filly, you know the one, best of good things beaten, Dorky, she was up again on Saturday just last and I thought, sure fuckin’ thing, you know? I dropped the money I owed Kenny on Dorky. I thought if this little filly pulls through, that’ll be my ticket out of the whole bloody mess, Di. I’ve gotta confess I’ve been going a little stir crazy here lately, what with what happened to Alice a few weeks ago, and then I rolled me ute, as you know. I don’t know what the story was there, but look, my life flashed before my eyes, it really did. I thought, shit, some bastard’s really after my hide. ‘I put the fuckin’ lot, all Kenny’s bloody money, on Baz Richardson’s Dorky. And this is just between you and me, right? She came good all right, fucking beaut little pony, that one. I fucking knew she would be. But listen, this is just between you and me, right? I know you’re tight-lipped 147
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on stuff, Di, I know you’re okay. I’m putting my trust in you here.’ Diana looks him in the eye. ‘You ever met Nola’s ex-husband, Di?’ ‘No, I don’t think so.’ ‘Oh, you’d know it if you had. Big Maori bloke, drives a brand new Volvo, a black one. He’s a born-again Christian these days, but he was a bad bastard way back when.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘Doesn’t usually stop here, but.’ ‘Right.’ ‘Anyways, of all the fuckin’ people, you know, I mean I never really liked the guy, but shit. I found myself pinning me bloody hopes on him to get me out of the shit.’ ‘Hey?’ Diana remembers a roaring black semi, a shit-hot stereo, a song about trusting in Jesus. The whole thing seems like a scene out of some kind of B-grade film. She has an odd sensation that she’s stepped into the wrong story. This was supposed to be a plot in which girl runs away and finds herself and lives happily ever after. And quietly. Not girl runs away and gets dragged into someone else’s drug racket, someone else’s crime plot, someone else’s bullshit. It’s all too incestuous. ‘Anyway, the thing is, Di, and I know I can trust you on keeping quiet on this, but between Dorky and Nola’s ex, I’ve been totally bailed out. I mean, it’s not an ideal solution, from my point of view, but Zac’s interested in the, well, you know, the roadhouse as a legit thing, I guess, 148
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with a finger in a few other pies too, see. Anyway, the long and the short of it is I’m sort of out of the shit, for the time being, right. I’ve taken the ‘For Sale’ sign down. Zac’s fixed a few things up for me. The bikies are sweet. And I’ve got some wages here for ya. It’s all okay, mate, it’s all good.’ Diana watches the notes being unfolded from out of Bob’s wallet, but somehow the money doesn’t seem all that meaningful any more. ‘My best mate is dead,’ she says. Bob raises his brows. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He is taking another wad of bills out of his shorts pocket, unfolding them, and counting them out. ‘Six weeks’ back pay. And a Christmas bonus. There’s about fifteen hundred bucks here for you, mate.’ Diana takes the cash. ‘Right,’ he says, standing up and wiping his hands. ‘See you in the kitchen, eh? You right?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘You sure?’ ‘Yeah, thanks, Bob. I’m all right.’ ‘The only bloody way is up from here, mate. I’m telling ya. The only bloody way is up.’
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plastic shopping bag, half of it straight out of the office safe. When Eddie White’s stock truck pulls out from the roadhouse and up alongside her, she holds her breath a little. The stench is awful. He opens the passenger door. ‘Where you heading to, Di?’ ‘Further west.’ ‘Going home then?’ ‘Yeah, I guess.’ She climbs up high into the cab and doesn’t look back. As they speed up, the dawn greens and oranges of Maccullochs Range fly past — broken fences, dry ground — and it’s not long before they’re slowing down for the sixty zone to pass through Wilcannia townsite. They pass the boarded up shops and dusty houses at a snail’s pace. She watches as a little boy stands defiantly in the middle of the road up ahead, resting his pushbike against his hips. He doesn’t move, despite the approaching truck. ‘Off the road, ya silly bugger,’ says the driver. The truck gets closer to the boy. The boy gets closer to the truck. He’s all of eight or nine. He holds his head high. Suddenly the Mack veers left a little and the boy disappears from view. They must have passed him close. ‘Un-fucking-believable, some of these people, eh?’ Diana swallows. The vehicle accelerates. On the other side of town, she can feel her face screwing up. There’s something wrong. It seems that it’s always like this, just when you try to make some kind of go of it, and feel good about yourself, something else has to get factored 150
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in. Now her lower back aches. She tries to stretch it, arching back a little, pushing her shoulders back. They pass a sign: ‘BH 175’. Eddie White clears his throat and turns on the stereo. ‘I dunno if you like Bruce Springsteen.’ She’s feeling faint. There’s no armrest on the passenger side, nothing to hold onto. She rests her hands on her abdomen instead and looks across at Eddie White. ‘He’s all right,’ she says, trying not to flinch. She wipes a small bead of sweat from her upper lip with the back of her hand. There’s a sharp cramp now, and then another. Bruce Springsteen is singing and a freight train running through the middle of my head and Diana feels a wetness in her underpants. ‘Is it hot in here,’ she says, ‘or is it just me?’ The driver doesn’t answer. The driver is oblivious. He’s tapping his forefingers against the steering wheel, looking out at the road ahead, and singing Oh, oh, oh, I’m on fire. Diana shuts her eyes for a moment, swallows. Her blood is sticky against the seat of her jeans and it’s probably going to soak straight through and stain Eddie White’s upholstery. She turns slightly to look out the passenger window. Out there the heat of the day is stilling everything, even at this early hour. Another heavy vehicle passes, heading east. Whhoooosh. It will be an hour or two before they reach Broken Hill. She breathes in. 151
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Acknowledgements
Every effort was made to contact the copyright holders of non-original material reproduced in this text. In the cases where these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly. Lyrics from ‘Joy’ by Kirk Franklin on p. 11. © Published by Malaco Music Company/BMG Music Publishing International Limited and used with kind permission by BMG Music Publishing Australia Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. Lyrics for ‘St James Infirmary Blues’ on p. 32. (Primose/ Redman) reproduced with kind permission from J. Albert and Son Pty Ltd. Lyrics from ‘I’m on Fire’ by Bruce Springsteen on p. 151. © 1984 Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Universal Music Publishing Australia P/L. 153
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Bob’s race talk on the filly by the name of Dorky, racing at Doomben, has been adapted from the Australian website Pro-Punter. The phrase ‘best of good things beaten’ is a direct quote from the 10 January 2003 newsletter in which a filly by the name of Dorky did indeed race at Doomben. Acccording to the website, ‘The filly was involved in a bumping duel for the length of the straight, lost momentum, and just missed out in the closest of photos by a nose. Dorky was the best of good things beaten.’ Available at http://www.propun.com.au (my access date 11 October 2003). Reprinted by kind permission of Neil at Pro-Punter. The fight scene between Nicole and Diana first appeared as a feature article in the ‘Fight’ issue of M/C Journal of Media and Culture in March 2003. Extracts from very early notes for Road Story were published in Mattoid in 1997.
Road Story was completed as part of a doctoral thesis in creative writing at the University of Queensland (2001–2004). I was supported during the writing process by a University of Queensland Postgraduate Research Scholarship, for which I am very grateful. I would like to thank Jan McKemmish, Amanda Lohrey and Bronwen Levy at the University of Queensland for their critical feedback on the work-in-progress over several incarnations and also for their belief in my work. 154
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I was also fortunate to be able to spend an intensive and productive period working on this manuscript as part of an Emerging Writer in Residence fellowship at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Greenmount, Western Australia, funded by ArtsWA, in 2001. Occasional readers of drafts included Simone Lazaroo, Sally Scott, my fellow postgraduates at the University of Queensland, and (many years ago) my writers’ group in Wollongong — thank you all for your time and your encouragement. Thank you to my colleagues at Curtin University of Technology for their support, and especially for the generous leave arrangements that made this book possible. Thank you to the sponsors of The Australian/Vogel Award and to the 2004 judging panel — Jean Bedford, James Bradley, Stella Clarke and Liam Davison — and a special acknowledgement to the following people at Allen & Unwin on account of their warm welcome and their outstanding professionalism — Annette Barlow, Jemma Birrell, April Murdoch, Marie Baird, Christa Munns, Jody Lee and Ali Lavau. Finally, I am very grateful to my friends and family, particularly my parents, Adrian and Jennifer van Loon, and my partner, Neville Sweeney. Only such unreserved loving-kindness makes other good things possible.
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OTHER AWARD WINNERS FROM ALLEN & UNWIN Troubled Waters: Borders, boundaries and possession in the Timor Sea Ruth Balint JOINT WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN/VOGEL LITERARY AWARD FOR 2003 Troubled Waters tells the story of Australia’s northern waters and their dramatic transformation in the twentieth century from a backwater to the most militarised and fiercely guarded region in Australia. Once a bridge between two coastlines and two cultures, the Timor Sea has become, in the last years of the twentieth century, the nation’s frontline against the threat of invasion. When Australia expanded its territorial boundaries by 200 nautical miles in 1979, Australia reached the doorstep of eastern Indonesia. The occupation of the sea was driven by the myth of mare nullius, the idea that the sea was empty and that no-one would suffer the loss of them. But for the traditional fishermen of West Timor, these waters are their sea garden. Ruth Balint tells this powerful story of a people evicted from their seas and their struggle for survival. ‘A social, political and cultural history with a particularly strong chapter on people smuggling and the Tampa . . . absorbing and compelling.’ Andrew Riemer ‘Very impressive. Lucid and timely, the ambiguities, resonances and ways of seeing it explored are genuinely fascinating.’ James Bradley ISBN 1 74114 361 6
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Drown them in the Sea Nicholas Angel JOINT WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN/VOGEL LITERARY AWARD FOR 2003 With dreams of moving to a house by the sea haunting their every day, Millvan and his wife, Michelle, owners of a riverside property in a small outback farming community, struggle with drought, friends, adversaries and the wrenchingly familiar rural cycle of hope and despair. Drown them in the Sea tells a compellingly honest story of the challenges and hardships of farming life in Australia. In vivid, vital language, Nicholas Angel captures both devastated landscape and human desire in this powerfully authentic evocation of life on the land. ‘This one grows on you. There’s a deceptive slightness to the story — a simple one which reveals a very important underlying narrative. It has honesty and charm.’ Jean Bedford ‘This story climbs to a gripping crescendo. Its strength lies in its roughened, hard-edged, quite lyrical representations of farming existence, bush enmities and camaraderie. Nicholas Angel takes you through spiralling hope, fear and desperation. His evocation of the bush is memorable.’ Stella Clarke ISBN 1 74114 349 7
