The Roadhouse

by Kerry McGinnis

  ‘I’ll get round to it,’ Bob growled behind me and I startled, slipping from my precarious perch.

  ‘We need a full-time maintenance man,’ I said. ‘Someone to paint and mow and water. The homestead fence is going to fall down anytime, and there’s a sheet of tin loose somewhere on one of the sheds. I could hear it flogging when the wind got up last night.’

  ‘I know. I ain’t deaf,’ he said testily. ‘But there ain’t no chance of hiring anyone. I came to tell you there won’t be no power for a bit. I gotta service the diesel.’

  ‘Okay, Bob.’ An engine surged into life and a moment later Sid’s truck pulled away. ‘So, did she take the job – Ute?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed gloomily. ‘Wog tucker – that’ll be the next bloody thing.’

  I found Mum in the laundry readying a load of washing. ‘Bob’s turning the genny off,’ I warned. ‘Said he was going to service the engine. What did you think of Ute, and where is she now?’

  ‘Settling in. She’s got the end donga.’ There were four demountable units at the eastern end of the roadhouse that served as accommodation for staff or travellers. ‘She seems capable enough. I had her make her own breakfast. A few minutes and she had the hang of the kitchen, and she cleared up very efficiently after herself.’ Mum had sorted the dark clothes into a basket as she spoke and now stooped to lift them.

  ‘Here,’ I said, ‘let me. I’ll get that.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly – aah!’ Her face twisted as she gasped in sudden pain. She whitened and dropped the basket, bending double and clutching at her left arm, then slowly toppled over and collapsed in a loose heap on the floor.

  ‘Mum! Oh my god, Mum!’ I darted to the door yelling ‘Bob!’ at the top of my lungs, then raced back to my mother’s prostrate form, straightening her legs and rolling her onto her side. The recovery position, I thought frantically. What else were you supposed to do for a stroke. Was it a stroke? Or a full-blown heart attack? I yelled Bob’s name again and laid my ear uselessly against her chest, but it was Ute who appeared, frowning, in the doorway.

  ‘You call very loudly. What happens? There is the problem, yes?’

  ‘Yes! Run – the phone in the kitchen. Ring the flying doctor. The number will be on the whiteboard beside the phone. Tell them my mother’s collapsed. It’s her heart. Then come back. Hurry, Ute.’

  Wasting no time on questions, she sped away. I grabbed an armful of dirty clothing to place under Mum’s head and fumbled at her wrist for a pulse. She was very pale but seemed to be breathing okay and a moment later she sighed and her eyes fluttered open.

  ‘Mum!’ I seized her hand. ‘God, you gave me the biggest fright. What happened?’

  ‘Charlie?’ She seemed dazed, but at least she could talk and she knew me. Her features looked equal too, mouth and brows level and there had been no slurring of my name. I eased her onto her back, adjusting the makeshift pillow.

  ‘Are you in pain? Can you breathe okay?’

  ‘Just tired, and my arm hurts … but the pain’s easing now – better, anyway. I should … get up.’

  ‘No. Stay where you are for a bit.’ Uneven footsteps pounded on the path and I swivelled about expecting Ute but it was Bob, out of breath and alarmed.

  ‘Molly,’ he gasped, seeing her conscious. ‘What the hell … you playing at, girl?

  ‘It’s okay,’ I soothed. Ute must have told him. ‘She’s had a bit of a turn and fainted. We’re calling the doctor and when she’s rested a bit longer we’re going to get her onto a bed until the plane gets here.’

  ‘Oh, but I can’t —’ Mum began.

  I opened my mouth and Bob beat me to the draw. ‘Yer can and yer will, Molly. I’ve had a gutful of you pretendin’ there’s nothing wrong when a blind man can see there is. There won’t never be a better time to get yerself fixed up. Charlie can run the place and we’ve got ourselves a cook. You’re goin’ to hospital and that’s flat.’

  ‘You are, you know,’ I seconded. My mother sighed, closing her eyes in tacit surrender, and that frightened me almost as much as her collapsing had.

  The doctor wasted no time. The staff at the Flying Doctor Base rang back with his ETA and we were out at the airstrip waiting when the plane touched down. Mum was loaded onto a stretcher, which the doctor and his pilot manoeuvred into the aircraft, followed by the bag I’d packed for her. The doctor, a bald six-footer called Clive Spears, took a few moments to reassure me that all would be well.

  ‘It’s an angina attack, and it’s probably a good thing it happened. I warned her of the need to slow down, but she was never going to listen. A pacemaker is just a small procedure. We’ll get it done maybe Wednesday when the cardiologist is due in town again. So a few days’ bed rest first will do her no harm at all. They’ll probably do some tests at the hospital – cholesterol, and maybe an angiogram to check her arteries. A thorough investigation. Try not worry too much – she’ll be a new women when you get her back.’ He smiled and ducked under the wing while Bob and I withdrew to the parked station wagon to watch the plane take off and arrow away into the blue above the range.

  When it had vanished from sight, Bob turned the key in the ignition, saying, ‘Wednesday. Well, you were gonna stay till the do next Sunday, weren’t yer? So her being gone meanwhile won’t muck up yer plans. She’ll be home by then.’

  ‘Maybe – but if they’re thinking of an angiogram now … That gives them a picture of her arteries. It might turn out that Mum needs a stent, or even a bypass. Anyway, I’m not going back, Bob. I’m home for the duration.’

  His eyes, squinched in their wrinkled surrounds of flesh, studied me, giving nothing away. ‘Good,’ he grunted. ‘Glad to hear it, Charlie. I reckon Molly’ll be too, though she won’t never admit it.’

  ‘It’s what I want, too,’ I said. ‘It just took me a while to work it out.’ I eyed him curiously as he engaged the gear and drove off. ‘Something I wondered, Bob – did Mum ever let on that Annabelle wasn’t her niece? Because it turns out she’s my half-sister, if you can believe it.’

  ‘No, she never did, but it figures.’ He shook his head and snorted in disgust. ‘He was a proper piece of work, yer dad. Did she know?’

  ‘Annabelle? Apparently. She wanted money – that’s why she came to see Mum. Money, or a means of raising it against the roadhouse.’

  ‘Good Christ!’ he muttered disgustedly. ‘She was his get all right! Take – that’s all either of ’em knew. No wonder Molly’s in hospital.’

  I remembered then and exclaimed in dismay. ‘The letter! I wonder if it came and, if it did, whether Mum had a chance to read it?’

  ‘Reckon you’d better check,’ he said, coasting into the shed bay that served as a carport and switching off the motor. ‘The copper’s bound to want to see it too.’

  The letter was waiting in the bag, which hadn’t yet been emptied, addressed to Mrs M Carver, PMB 21, Garnet Roadhouse, via Alice Springs. The sender’s name A Carver adorned the back flap but without an accompanying address. Much as I longed to open it, I knew I couldn’t and laid it aside with a sigh. Annabelle’s explanation, if that was what it was, would have to wait until my mother’s return. Perhaps it was just as well, I reflected. I wouldn’t have put it past her to have made her final communication accusatory in tone, a look what you made me do epistle, in revenge for Mum’s failure to give her what she’d wanted.

  By the time I’d sorted the mail and checked on Ute, already rearranging the shelves of the kitchen fridge to suit herself, the heavy beat of the diesel had recommenced and the power was back on. I started to explain what she’d need to do and was firmly interrupted.

  ‘I have the menu, yes? They order, I cook. Is simple enough, Charlie. Your mother has the good care now, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed feebly, and left her to it. I started the washing machine, then returned to the roadhouse where a vehicle was pulling in under the shade trees out front. I checked the cash in the till and waited for my first customer to enter
.

  By smoko time the roadhouse was busy. Bob had taken over at the counter, dispensing beer and cold drinks, taking requests for coffee and snacks, and scribbling down orders for meals, which he handed in to Ute through a hatch in the wall that divided the kitchen from the front room. Travellers stopped off for fuel, to browse the stand of tourist literature, to ask questions about the road and distances between places, or to purchase a postcard or one of the other small souvenirs from the shelf by the door. Finding myself unemployed, I went off to finish the house chores, starting by hanging out the wet clothes.

  That done, I pulled the mower from the shed and began hunting for the whipper-snipper. It turned out to be in pieces on the bench in the workshop, obviously a work in progress that Bob was still getting around to finishing. The edges would have to wait, but the lawn couldn’t. Having checked the fuel and the spark plug, I primed the mower, gave a tentative tug to the starting cord and was gratified to hear the engine roar into life.

  Mowing was a soothing, repetitive task. It gave me time to think while providing an occupation that helped lessen my anxiety over my mother. The doctor’s words had been more reassuring than her tired, grey-faced appearance as she’d vanished from my sight. Was a pacemaker really going to cure the ‘irregularity’ that Dr Spears had spoken of, or did a more serious problem lie behind her collapse? Spears was a GP, not a cardiologist. He didn’t have the equipment to carry out the tests that she would have had in Melbourne, for instance. I wondered if any beyond the most basic were available in Alice Springs, and whether I should have insisted on a transfer to a city hospital. But I couldn’t force her to go and I guessed, anyhow, that there was no way she would agree to it.

  Sweat gathered round my neck and shoulders as the pile of lawn cuttings grew. I felt the skin of my arms tighten from the heat and belatedly realised that an overshirt would have been sensible. My skin was city pale, after all. By the time I’d finished, I was hot and the thin t-shirt was clinging to my body. I emptied the last catcher of grass, pushed the mower back to its home and went to sit in the coolest spot I knew of, the old summerhouse behind the weed-laden flowerbed. I had sedulously shunned it until now, but if I was going to stay at the Garnet for any length of time, then avoidance simply wouldn’t work. Fanning my flushed face with my hat, I stepped resolutely inside the space where my life had been shattered, and my heart broken, five years before.

  Chapter Five

  Nothing about it had changed. The floor was still flagged with irregular slabs of stone carefully butted together between sand-filled cracks; the long bench seat, with its rounded timber back and stout red-gum legs, was the same, though dusty and spider-webbed from disuse. The thatching of the roof, fashioned from spinifex packed between layers of netting was as I remembered it, and the semi-open latticed sides still drew in the cooling breezes. Someone had added a cane chair and I chose that, having first tipped it up to check for redbacks, rather than the bench where, that now-long-ago day I had chanced upon Annabelle and Bryan flagrante delicto.

  The words, which I had never used before, hadn’t sprung to mind then, of course, as I stared in disbelief and horror at the two of them. But long afterwards, my soul still writhing in shame and self-hatred at my naivety, I had looked it up. ‘In blazing offence’ was its literal meaning. Well, you couldn’t say fairer than that, I had thought, about catching one’s fiancé and cousin semi-naked in each other’s arms. The look of horror on Bryan’s face when he saw me had been almost as bad as the act he was engaged in. A guilty visage would have meant a conscience, but the horrified expression I had glimpsed upon his face showed only that he’d never intended for me to learn of his betrayal.

  Because, I had realised, plumbing his expression in that revelatory moment, no overweening passion had brought him to this assignation in the summerhouse. The knowledge had seared through me like a flame until the beautiful edifice of trust I had built to contain my love for him was a smoking ruin at my feet. It wasn’t a mistake; he hadn’t simply chosen the wrong Carver girl to marry and discovered the fact too late. His expression of horror and almost ludicrous dismay at my untimely arrival plainly showed that he’d meant for our marriage to go ahead as planned, doubtless with side benefits to be supplied by Annabelle as and when the mood and opportunity took them both. In this – as in so much else where my cousin was concerned – I was, as usual, to come out second best.

  And now she was dead. I wondered if my mother had cried over the news. I felt no inclination to do so, but Mum, after all, had raised her. I had seen my mother angry, I reflected, and exasperated, and sad, but I had never actually seen her weep. Not even when my father died. Stunned, yes, by the suddenness of it, and then she had just got on with things as was her wont. She had been furious with both Annabelle and Bryan over the cause of my broken engagement, bracingly sympathetic with me, and supportive when I had slapped the smirk from Annabelle’s face. I had put into that blow, I could now admit, not only the fury of betrayal but the resentment of years. Because the smirk that had accompanied her careless dismissal of the act – Well, if you’re too shy to satisfy a man, what makes him off limits to someone who will? – told me that she had planned the whole thing, including being found out.

  I had wept. Buckets of tearing heartfelt sobs, an orgy of grief and pain over the shattering revelation of smashed dreams. Being told, ‘Better to find out before you marry than after,’ and the old standby, ‘He was never good enough for you, anyway,’ did nothing to ease it. I had been too upset then to even consider why Annabelle had acted as she had, but now I wondered if the deed had been borne of jealousy. Because I was acknowledged as Jim Carver’s daughter and she was not. Nothing else accounted for it – she was prettier than me, cleverer too, and more popular, a flower for everyman’s attention to light upon. And now she was dead.

  There had to be a point somewhere between grief, of which I felt none, and ‘good riddance’, I thought guiltily. Annabelle had been a close blood relative, even if I hadn’t previously been aware of how close. She could do me no more harm, and I was suddenly, uneasily aware that, given Mum’s collapse, it would probably fall to me to speak on Annabelle’s behalf at the service on Sunday. No life could matter so little that something kind and thoughtful couldn’t be said about it. If —

  ‘Hello!’ a man’s voice called. ‘Anybody home?’

  Startled, I scrambled up from my seat and looked out to see a khaki-clad figure turning a slow circle on the lawn. He called again. ‘Anybody here?’

  ‘I am,’ I said, stepping out of the summerhouse. ‘Charlie Carver. Who are you looking for?’

  ‘You, Miss Carver. Bob said you were over here somewhere. I’m Tom Cleary, the constable from Harts Range.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ The khaki shirt and puggareed hat should have made that obvious. ‘I was miles away.’ I became belatedly aware of my dishevelled, sweat-stained appearance, and brushed at the grass cuttings sticking to my jeans. ‘Sorry. What’s it about, then?’

  He coughed, looking awkward. ‘No, I’m sorry – for your loss and to bother you at this time. The letter the deceased wrote … have you received it yet? The police in Alice would like a look at it, you see.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, well, it was in the mail but I’m afraid my mother hasn’t opened it yet. She was evacuated by the flying doctor this morning, before she had a chance to …’

  ‘Molly’s ill? I’m sorry to hear it. And you haven’t opened it yourself?’ His glance was disturbingly keen, like someone waiting to pounce on the tiniest inaccuracy, and I bridled.

  ‘Certainly not! It’s addressed to my mother. And I’m afraid you can’t have it until she’s seen it.’

  ‘Ah. What’s happened to Molly, then? You said the doctor flew her out?’

  ‘She collapsed. Her heart,’ I replied baldly. ‘So I’m afraid you’ll all have to wait. Even if I could, I wouldn’t be upsetting her now with whatever’s in that letter.’

  ‘No, I see that. Well, I hope you have good new
s of her soon. Please give her my best when you speak to her next. She’s an institution around the range, you know.’ His keen eyes assessed me. ‘You live away, Miss Carver? I’ve not seen you before.’

  ‘Oh, call me Charlie. No, I work – worked in Melbourne. Look, as you’re here, perhaps you can tell me, will there be an inquest held for Annabelle, and if so, when?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said definitely. ‘All unexplained or unexpected deaths warrant one. As to when, I’m afraid I couldn’t say. You’ll be informed at the time.’

  ‘Right, thanks. Oh,’ I remembered, ‘Padre Don will be holding a memorial service here tomorrow week, around two-ish, if you’d like to come? And if you wouldn’t mind passing it on to any of the neighbours you see in the meantime? I’ll be ringing around the stations this evening. Did you ever meet Annabelle, Tom?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. But my wife and I will certainly attend to support Molly. And I’ll spread the word.’ He lifted his hat and turned away.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to his retreating form. I’d almost forgotten about ringing the neighbours. It would be cheaper after seven but there was one call I had to make immediately. It was hours now since the doctor’s plane had left the Garnet strip, so I went indoors to ring the hospital to inquire how Mum was doing.

  She was resting comfortably, according to the nurse who took the call. I asked if I could speak with her and was told she was sleeping at the moment. The news set off immediate alarm bells. The idea of Mum sleeping during daylight hours was so strange that I blurted, ‘Is she all right? I mean —’