The Mother Fault

by Kate Mildenhall

Be there by 6.

  She does not sleep, but lies back in the dark, adrenaline coursing through her. Her plan, blurry and nebulous, has surfaced from her mind and become something solid, something real.

  I am coming, she whispers into the dark, to Ben, to herself.

  11

  She’s been up for an hour already, quietly packing things, before she knows she has to wake them and tell them.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ says Essie, annoyed at being woken, belligerent and slow to move.

  But Sam is thrilled. ‘You mean it’s like a secret mission?’

  ‘Yes!’ Mim says, helping him into his t-shirt. ‘Yes, Sammy, a secret mission, because we can’t tell anyone about it.’

  ‘But we can’t drive all the way to Dad.’

  ‘Idiot,’ Essie mutters under her breath and Mim ignores her, at least she’s sitting up now.

  ‘That’s the exciting bit,’ Mim says, keeping her voice buoyant for Sam, ‘we’re going to sail there.’

  ‘On a boat?’ Essie looks unconvinced.

  ‘Uhuh.’

  ‘Whose boat?’

  ‘Nick’s.’

  ‘Nick from dinner?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Essie’s face is still sceptical.

  Sam jumps in. ‘What kind of boat?’

  ‘We’ll find out when we get to Darwin.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Essie’s arched eyebrows, her tone – will she question everything?

  ‘Yep.’ Mim is nodding, convincing herself now. ‘Yep, we’ll drive up there and it’ll take us a few days, and then we’ll get on Nick’s boat and we’ll go to Dad’s island and we’ll see him and everything will go back to normal.’

  Just like that.

  ‘Cool,’ says Sam. ‘Do you think Helen will make us jam on toast before we go?’

  * * *

  Helen does make toast. She also plies them with packages of sandwiches and tubs of cut fruit and packets of chips until Nick puts his foot down and says there isn’t any more room.

  ‘You take care,’ Helen says into Mim’s ear as she hugs her. ‘Of you, them, and my boy,’ she adds and Mim understands how it pains her to watch her son take off again.

  He wants to drive first and he doesn’t even look back as they pull out and up the street. Mim thinks she sees a curtain twitch in the house on the corner.

  It is a relief when they pull out on to the highway, watching the turn-off recede in the rear-vision mirror.

  It’s just shy of four thousand kilometres to Darwin. That’s what Nick says. They can each take a turn driving, stop for a few hours, sleep overnight in the car if they have to, take a proper break in Isa, maybe further, if they can make it. They drive for thirteen hours on that first day. Crossing the border, feeling the land change beneath them. She agrees they will swap every four hours, but the third time she opens her window, Nick says, ‘My turn, pull over,’ and she gladly takes the passenger seat. Stepping out of the car, the heat hits her like a furnace. It beats down from the cloudless sky and radiates up from the sticky bitumen so that she is engulfed by it. She makes Sam piss in the shade of the tyre and Essie refuses, says she’ll hold on. The heat shimmers on the plains on either side of the road. You could die out here, she thinks, so quick, you wouldn’t even know it was happening. She turns the air conditioning up when she gets back in, her face feels fried from just a few minutes out there, but Nick turns it down again.

  ‘Uses too much fuel,’ he says. ‘Your cash’ll be gone.’

  She wishes they could have brought her car, the one Heidi took. Thinks of the comfort. The cool. Still, the Department would’ve picked them up immediately. Plus, she wonders if there’s anywhere to charge out here. They drive on.

  She wants to text Heidi, We’ve left the state. But she doesn’t. She will call from Darwin. Wants to be ready to leave, to jump off the map, when she risks it again. Nick lasts the full four hours, makes it five. It is endless road. The kids watch movie after movie and she diligently swaps leads to charge, not caring how their eyes are going red, how they don’t look out, even when she calls, ‘Look at that!’ A hawk hovering above the long ditch grasses, a rocky outcrop breaking the flat expanse, a sign in bad font – The end is nigh! – fluorescent and strange at the edge of a paddock. Every now and then she sees movement on the road ahead, leans forward and recognises, only as they take flight, the thick bodies and black eyes of eagles, frightened off from where they have been beak-deep in the bloody innards of roadkill. When she drops her head to watch them in the side mirror, she can see them wheel around and alight again to feast.

  Nick drives until dinnertime, where they have the choice between three types of burgers and sweating chips at a roadhouse and she says yes to all of it because, god, she wants it too, the sugar salt fizz of it all. To keep her awake. To keep on driving.

  ‘You right to keep going?’ he asks and she says yes, and makes the kids get into pyjamas and brush their teeth in the toilets before they do the next stint. Because she can keep some little bit of normal, she can do that.

  ‘Are we gonna drive all night?’ Sam asks as they walk into the hot night air.

  ‘Maybe, maybe we will, it’s our secret mission, remember?’ And he tucks his hand into hers.

  * * *

  Headlights on bitumen, the white lines. The ragged vibration when she lets the car slip too far to the edge. Because night is hard. The weight of her eyelids. Her neck jerks and she wasn’t asleep, she’d never, but she knows that this is the kind of tired that won’t be fixed by another bit of chewy, by opening her eyes wider. It was always Ben who did the night driving, the long stints of it. Ben to keep them safe. Ben to get them there, get them home.

  She pulls into a truck stop to piss and wakes Nick.

  ‘I can’t go any further. Can we stop?’

  He blinks, stretches. ‘Nah, I’m good.’

  * * *

  She tucks her jumper in under her neck, rests her forehead against the cool glass, adjusts the seat, back then up again, remembering Sam’s little legs behind her.

  ‘You good?’ she asks, checking his profile in the low lights of the dash.

  ‘Mmh hmm,’ he murmurs. ‘Mind if I have music?’

  She shakes her head, closes her eyes. She can’t place the song, guitar, a woman’s voice, but it’s nice.

  ‘You gonna tell me any more?’ Nick asks.

  She waits, keeps her head against the window.

  ‘About what you’re doing.’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘Yeah. I get that.’

  The slumbering darkness outside, the stars. She wonders what they look like from up there. A tiny cocoon of light, barrelling along in the dark. The boy from the beach, from her past, she would tell him everything. Wants to feel the lightness of passing it on. But something tugs at her. Heidi’s voice, maybe. The danger of nostalgia. The world has changed. We have changed. You can’t go back.

  ‘You’re gonna at least have to tell me which island we’re headed to, and what the story’s gonna be if you have no ID on you.’

  She stays quiet.

  ‘I don’t care what your deal is, but I do care about my boat, and I’m not really into the idea of an Indo prison.’ He shakes his head.

  ‘Yeah. Nah. Neither am I.’

  He nods. ‘Your husband. He’s there?’

  ‘Working on the Golden Arc project.’

  ‘He in trouble?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And you reckon you turning up there… that’s gonna be, what? Useful?’

  Will it be useful? The same pit of doubt swims and simmers inside her. Maybe he’s right – what good is she going to do, turning up there with the kids?

  ‘Well, I can’t stay here.’ An edge of defensiveness in her voice. ‘And he’s there – or he was – and so it makes sense.’ She looks away. ‘It did make sense.’

  ‘Just want to make sure we’re on the same page.’

  ‘Okay.’ She looks at him. ‘S
o are we on the same page now?’

  ‘Yep.’ He nods, briefly returning the look. ‘Yep, I reckon we are.’

  They drive on.

  * * *

  The ache in her neck wakes her. They are stopped. She looks around. Still dark. Nick has the driver’s seat all the way back, his head turned from her, snoring quietly. She twists around, kids both asleep, blankets tucked around them, they’ve got pillows at least to prop against. A patch of white, dried dribble on Essie’s chin. She’ll hate that when she wakes up.

  She stretches her neck back, to the side. She has to move.

  Outside, it’s cooler than she’d expected. A half moon and scats of blue cloud moving quick, swathes of stars revealed in between. They’re in a truck stop. The big bodies of road trains lined up. She can see a toilet lit up a hundred metres away. She looks back at the kids sleeping in the car. Squats down where she is, pulls down her jeans and pisses next to the tyre. It’s loud in the quiet but she can’t stop now.

  She tries to close the door quietly when she gets back in, but she hears Nick shift.

  ‘You okay?’ he says.

  ‘Yep. You?’

  ‘Just needed a break.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Outside Winton. What time is it?’ He clicks the ignition and the dash lights up. Four ten.

  ‘I can drive,’ she says.

  * * *

  She has never watched the sunrise from the driver’s seat before. They are all still asleep. In the night they have travelled so far and she feels as though morning is breaking in a dreamscape. The sky is underbellied with cloud and the sun blushes deep red against the dark far off in the east. Slowly it begins to glow, pink then amber then a fiery golden light that surely cannot be real. This new jewelled light of dawn reveals a space so big she cannot comprehend it. God, the sky, the sky! She resists the urge to touch Nick’s shoulder, to whisper in awe, Look at that!

  The warm orange of the earth begins to glow. She shakes her head at the colours. She hasn’t been up here, in this part of the country, but she knows what it is. They are crossing the northern arc of the Tasman line. Or someone’s delineation of it anyway, one of the great many lines in her profession that are unclear. Beneath her feet, the tyres, the bitumen and down further, ancient earth meets less ancient earth, a continent built from west to east, each block and plate abutting the next, fusing, subducting, mountain-making. The deep, deep time of it had always been comforting to her. The element, perhaps, that attracted her to geology in the first place: something old, slow. Trying to get her head around the rate of continental drift – both infinitesimal and monumental. It had calmed her anxiety to speak in epochs. There was something quietly immovable about those in earth sciences, their dry fingers loosening over rocks, the steady accumulation of data, cautious findings, bedrock beliefs.

  * * *

  She remembers picking up the stone and handing it to the professor on one of her first field trips at uni. ‘Like this?’

  ‘Ah,’ says the wild-haired woman, ‘close, close, but this is not a tektonite. So rare, it would be incredibly lucky to find one.’

  Mim returns the black stone to the dry riverbed, hears the clunking reverberations of the other first years as they wander, search, sketch.

  The gorge is deep. In the middle of the day, it is flooded with sunlight, but within an hour or two it will grow cold in the shadow, the damp of the stone rising up, the subterranean smell of it.

  The professor puts her old hand against the rock, identifying each layer: limestone, basalt, karst, sediment upon sediment, a timeline in rock.

  ‘See here,’ she implores them, ‘the water, and here, the wind, tree, charcoal, shell, crustacean – the history of the earth writ upon itself. It makes sense now?’

  The past is a timeline compressed neatly in order. Mim feels the shudder of understanding move through her as her teacher asks them to imagine what this rock might have witnessed over the millennia it has been forming, the calving of continents, the retreat of oceans, the creatures that may have passed it by. It calms Mim, makes the unknown that trembles and undulates in her solid.

  What she won’t remember is that he was also there. When they realise they will laugh about it. Ben will make out he noticed her, she will enjoy the fact that she was more taken by the rocks than by him.

  But she will think about it often. A girl on that same field trip eleven years later will find a tektonite. Mim will remember back to that day in the gorge and the unfolding of time within her, the feeling that she could lay herself down and become part of the rock. The deep quiet that settled. At the same time as a crack had appeared, fine and granular, the beginning of something; the two planes of herself, past and future, ready to collide.

  * * *

  She had thought herself immovable. She and Ben both, before Essie. The naivety of it stings now, but they had spoken of a shared workload, both working, both in projects they were passionate about, both taking time off to parent.

  But then.

  The cataclysmic arrival that had begun moderately enough, but finally left Mim a fragmented version of herself. She couldn’t even remember all the pieces to gather back up to remake herself. There was Before Essie. And After.

  And now this.

  She concentrates on the colours. The astonishing expanse of sky striped with apricot, mauve and pale blue. The red earth on either side of the black strap of highway. Behind her the kids murmur and, ever so slightly, she accelerates into the north.

  * * *

  The fields of black solar panels begin a couple of hours before they arrive in Isa. A town with a boom and bust past. Got big with extraction, and nearly died as the government, finally and against all odds, decommissioned mines right across the country. Isa would have had its final death throes, except for a mad Queenslander with pockets as deep as his chest was wide, who decided to make it the hub of the solar industry and sink his dollars and political clout into ironing out the legislative issues, the synching, all the problems people threw at it to make the solution so much harder than it needed to be. There is something reverent in it. The way the acres of black panels turn to face the sun in worship. The glare. The way, out here, you can see the sunlight streaming in, turning itself into capital.

  It is late afternoon when they arrive. She feels her body cramping into the seat. Nick is still asleep, head lolled to one side, shirt wedged under his chin. Essie, awake in the back, notices the turn.

  ‘Are we stopping?’

  ‘You want to?’

  ‘Can we go to a caravan park?’

  She glances at the rear-vision mirror. Essie tucks her chin into her neck and smiles. Maybe they don’t need to go further today.

  They choose the one with the pool. And pay for the privilege. But it’s worth it. The water is the blue of childhood. The clap of skin hitting water, puddles of sun on the surface, the pleasant stink of chlorine. Sam runs at it, ignoring her calls to slow down.

  ‘Can he swim?’ Nick asks, coming up next to her.

  She dumps the towels from the cabin on the end of the wooden bench. ‘Yep. He’s good.’

  Mim fiddles with the straps of her singlet. Black undies and top will have to do.

  ‘Coming, Mum?’ Sam calls.

  She pulls off her shorts. Feels flabby, too many days on the road, shit food, her legs all white. God, how badly does she need a shave? She hurries to follow Essie up to the deep end, trying to stand up straight, her hands behind her, covering the black cotton of her undies.

  Essie drops her towel, scurries towards the edge and dives straight in, clean and long. Under the surface her daughter’s body distorts, grows longer again. Mim is struck by the thought that her daughter will one day be taller than her. She clamps her toes around the chipped blue tiles of the edge. Before she dives, she looks ahead, sees Nick watching her, and she concentrates a little harder, lengthening her body as she arcs into the water.

  ‘Stupid,’ she mouths to herself underwater befor
e she surfaces, shaking the image of his face turned towards her. She kicks out hard towards the edge.

  12

  The main drag is wide and bisected by stunted trees in the strange peachy light of dusk. Cameras hang bulbous like oddly uniform fruit bats from the streetlights. She dips her chin. She’d considered trying to find some fresh food. Her mouth feels coated with salt and fat from roadhouse bain-maries. But the cash will last longer if she resists the lure of expensive apples and the green crunch of lettuce. There is the flashing sign of a Krave Burger up ahead and she is already feeling the billowing absence on either side of her where the kids would be if she hadn’t told them to wait in the cabin and watch the screens.

  She feels herself stretching now that she is out of the car, as if the water today has unspooled something in her that has been twisting and tightening since they left the farm. Since before that. She feels purposeful. That she is going towards something, towards Ben. Not just reacting, hiding, running.

  A boy with a singlet and a beanie overtakes her with his skateboard and she flinches at the sound. There are a few cars cruising down the main street, headlights beginning to glow in the darkening evening. Families pulling in, kids in the back, faces lit by screens while a parent jumps out to pick up something for tea. She wonders when they will be this again. When she will be back to those hours post school, never enough and always too long, when the kids begin to fight and whinge and the bags bulge with all the homework and the special family activities and the requests to volunteer and the bullshit, the endless bullshit of it. Because right now, despite the finger press of fear around her guts, despite the fact that she has left things broken and dangerous for people that she loves, and despite everything unknown that stands before her, she is okay with being here. In the heated dark of this town, striding out towards the next thing – to feed the kids, to get to the next place, and the next.