Is that thing diesel?

by Paul Carter

  ‘We should do a piece to camera here,’ Dan said from the back seat.

  ‘Keep going,’ I said. I didn’t want to stand there looking at it. Matt nodded and got back on the throttle and back into the story he was telling.

  Dan didn’t say anything; he was very tolerant of me, even though I knew he would be worried about the lack of footage now that we were all in the truck. Poor Dan was now stuck in the back seat with his small mountain of camera gear. The back seat was shocking: you couldn’t hear anything over the engine noise, and the air-conditioning, which was barely enough in the front seat to lower the temp a few degrees, was just about nonexistent in the back. He was also sitting on top of the engine, and that barbecued your backside after the first hour.

  Soon, however, I wasn’t thinking about Dan’s comfort anymore. By the time Matt pulled into Winton, 180 k’s later, I was in agony.

  Queensland’s crappy outback roads would throw the truck’s cab into the air every few minutes; my arse would leave the seat and come down hard, shooting waves of pain up and down my chest and shoulder. Because I could make out the potholes and bigger undulations up ahead I started tensing up and holding my breath just prior to the jolt, but this just made it worse.

  As we pulled out of Winton the wheel directly under my side of the cab slammed into a bottomless pothole and I lost it. The next 2068 k’s was feeling more like 10,000, and I still had over 8000 k’s to ride after Darwin—that is, if I could ride after Darwin at all. It was a dummy spit to end all dummy spits, but it made me feel a bit better. After all, there was no other option, we just had to keep going.

  During this nightmare of a drive, Matt was my source of light. Even at times like this he could make me laugh so hard I cried. His rants go way beyond my toilet humour and into a place that you reserve for the wrong stuff that on rare occasions pops into your head and leaves you wondering if you’re actually mental and just don’t know it yet. And because Matt’s stories are so out there, Dan couldn’t even think of filming us, much to his increasing annoyance. Matt would start out fairly fast and loose into his story or whatever he was talking about, enough to completely sucker you in; then he unleashes the Matt you didn’t see, the one hiding under his mild exterior, the Matt that I call Bad Matt. Dan would throw himself back into the rear of the truck’s boiling cab with his camera in his lap. ‘Right, well, thanks for that, I can’t use any of it.’

  The Matt rant could occasionally get scary in the cab of a truck doing 130 kilometres an hour. At one point while spouting a story about anal sex, he was looking straight at me, gesticultaing with both hands off the steering wheel: he was so entertaining I almost got comfortable, until a pothole threatened to re-crack my ribs.

  My morphine reserve was helping. Around the halfway mark, I opted to lie down flat on the back seat, and the magic pills put me away. I was in limbo, when the truck suddenly stopped.

  I heard Matt talking to someone and slowly sat up. There, in the absolute middle of nowhere, at an anonymous crossroads in central Queensland, was a group of eight lost backpackers. I got out of the cab; the drugs had me in their grip, and I wandered about on the baking hot road without a hat, looking at this group of carefree young backpackers. I don’t remember where they were going, but one of them, a Canadian dude with a goatee, crazy hair and an eye patch, was playing a piano accordion.

  My head was light as a feather, and Matt started dancing about in the middle of the road while Dan seized the opportunity to get some filming done. We all joined in. It was totally bizarre and very surreal, dancing a jig with the backpackers in the middle of the road in the blinding heat. Only in Australia.

  The Canadian stopped playing, and his keen young eye spotted me as the one on drugs. He walked up smiling, with his eye patch and hair all over the place. ‘Got some for me, man? I’m Carl.’

  ‘Sorry brother, I’m a drug pig. It’s morphine, I’ve been in an accident.’

  ‘Oh, too bad, are you going to be OK?’ He flipped up his eye patch and looked me up and down. ‘Hey,’ his finger came up and pointed at me, ‘I know you, man.’ I still had that feeling that perhaps I was still asleep and none of this was happening at all. ‘Did you write that book about the rigs?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘No fuckin way. Wait here.’ He bolted, and I turned to see him open the boot of their van and hurl all manner of crap into the road.

  ‘What’s the seal basher doing?’ Matt walked up.

  ‘I think he’s got a copy of one of my books in that van.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Matt threw his head back and laughed. ‘Way the fuck out here. You serendipitous bastard.’

  The young Canadian came bounding back with a yellowing, dog-eared copy of my first book. He’d hauled it all the way round the world to get it to exactly this point, where drug-fucked author met drug-fucked reader, at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere in the Australian outback.

  I fumbled with the pen, tried to focus and wrote something profound and purposeful, the most encouraging, thoughtful, indeed inspirational thing I could think of at the time, a golden nugget of truth. Here’s this guy, all of 22 or 23 years old, out on his first big adventure, eyeballing me and grinning like I’m a naked prom queen handing out free pot at a beer convention.

  I have a responsibility to make this count, I thought to myself. I slapped the book shut and made him promise not to look until we had disappeared into the heat haze in the opposite direction. ‘OK,’ he said, and pushed the book into his pocket. We all shook hands and parted company.

  I swallowed another pill and dragged myself into the back of the truck. Matt picked up right where he left off in whatever story he was telling as he pulled off the side of the road and headed towards Darwin.

  ‘What did you write in his book, mate?’ Dan was leaning over the front seat, his bearded face rocking from side to side with the truck.

  ‘Dear Craig, avoid the clap, love Paul.’

  Dan’s face disappeared, leaving me dreamily gazing at the truck’s roof, the hundreds of tiny dots in the fabric which gradually merged into blank sweaty sleep.

  Mount Isa came and went. I know I spent the night there, I remember staggering out of the truck in the dark, in pain, and falling in a heap. I remember calling Pia, a friend who works in Tennant Creek, to tell her we would be there the next day. I remember Matty helping me back into the truck in the dark, in pain, the next morning. More pills please, Mr Brown Paper Bag from the Longreach Hospital. I don’t remember crossing the border into the Northern Territory, but I do remember pulling into Tennant Creek. There I had a brief interlude of clarity.

  We parked outside the first pub, as Matty always does, walked in and sat down. Within five minutes Dan nearly got into a fight with a bloke over his camera. Then Pia arrived; she hadn’t changed a bit, she was full of life. We proceeded to get drunk, which of course is a really sensible course of action when you’re full of morphine. While I was staggering about in the beer garden—well, more of a dusty shambles than a beer garden—Matt Bromley called to tell me he was leaving Deus.

  ‘Oh shit, mate, what’s going on?’ I asked.

  He told me he’d been offered a job on the team of mechanics hand-picked to build the bikes for the upcoming Mad Max 4 movie. I could hear how excited he was over the phone.

  ‘You lucky fucker,’ I said.

  ‘You’re pissed, aren’t ya.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘How ya feelin?’

  ‘Well, put it this way, I’m not in any pain right now, brother.’

  We bullshitted for ages. Matt was so happy; I was happy for him, he deserved it. Damn right. I wandered back into the main bar. Pia, Matty, Dan and another ten people were sitting there drinking and talking. My head was full of nonsense and morphine. I couldn’t really join in; all I could do was listen and smile. Drinking in the Territory is li
ke a professional sport; men seriously hit the piss there. Finally, we opted to bow out of the booze fest and get a pizza across the road. I waited in the outdoor dining area out the front with a bottle of water. Pia, Matt, Dan, a woman we found out was the drummer from the band The Go-Betweens, and another guy were all standing about chatting. By that stage I’d lost the power of speech and basic hand-eye coordination, but hey, I was in no pain.

  The pizza arrived, and we were about to dig in when a car full of Aboriginal guys rolled up. A moment later another car full of Aboriginal guys rolled up. Everyone looked at each other. I know I looked like a wasted new graduate from some Nazi deportment school, so I hoped no one was looking at me. One guy from the first car asked where the guys from the second car were from. The answer came back—apparently from somewhere near Alice Springs. ‘Well, fuck off back there then.’

  The less aggressive second-car guys were outnum- bered two to one. They took one look at us, pizza triangles dangling in front of our open mouths, and said, ‘Hey, don’t carry on in front of the white people.’ All I remember was this huge booming voice from the first car right behind me. ‘W-W-W-WHITE PEOPLE, FUCK WHITE PEOPLE.’ The fence came down; it was on. I grabbed two slices of pizza and crawled under the table. Within a minute the pizza shop owner was out trying to separate them, and in another minute the police turned up.

  ‘You right there, mate?’ Dan was peering under the table at me, but my mouth was full so I couldn’t answer.

  The drummer from The Go-Betweens got me out from under the table and into her car. She dropped me off at the motel. ‘What are you on?’ she asked. I told her. ‘Hmm, better stay in tonight then.’

  Matty woke me up at 5 a.m. and we stumbled out to the truck. Dan fished out the last of the morphine from the hospital bag. ‘Thousand k’s today mate, all the way to Darwin. You’re going to need these, that’s the last of them.’

  I pulled my sore arse into the truck. In the early hours, with no drugs coursing through my system, it felt like someone had been going at me with a baseball bat. Matt drove flat out, only stopping for fuel and hot chips. We drove into a miserable-looking, one-camel town somewhere before Katherine. I slowly sat up.

  ‘It’s weird here.’ Dan was looking over to our left; there was a dust storm going full tilt outside, and everything was the same shade of light brown. There wasn’t a soul to be seen, no cars, no signs of life.

  We slowly made our way down the main street, and pulled into a service station. Matt hopped out, shielding his face with his hand against the sandblasting, and ran around to fill up the truck.

  ‘Pump’s not on.’

  I staggered out and we ran over to the main entrance, rather like people do when they’re caught in the rain, and stumbled through the open door. No one was there. We called out, but no one appeared. All you could hear was the wind howling outside. Dan came in, looking as perplexed as us. He shut the door, grabbed some bottled water from the fridge and plonked the bottles down on the dusty countertop.

  ‘Hello,’ Matt shouted. ‘Anyone here?’ We all leaned across the counter together to get a look into the back room around to the right. The door leading from there out to the back was banging against the frame in the wind, letting in intermittent plumes of dust.

  For five minutes we just stood there, the wind flipping the pages of magazines on the shelf behind the counter like a team of invisible speed readers. ‘You know, this is a bit like an Aussie horror movie,’ said Matt. ‘Wolf Creek meets the Griswolds.’ Dan was hooking into an ice cream, and I opened a bag of salt and vinegar chips.

  ‘Actually, more like a zombie movie,’ Matt said slowly, peering out into the street. We moved over to the window next to him, Dan with a face full of ice cream and me munching on more chips than one would consider polite to stuff into your mouth.

  At first I saw nothing in the billowing dust, but then I noticed movement in the bush across the road. A figure moving forward, not in a normal fashion; they were doing a stop-start shuffle, arms a bit too rigid. ‘Fuck,’ said Dan, and stopped eating. So did I.

  ‘There’s another one.’ Matt had his face pressed up against the window, trying to see through the dust and random airborne debris. Sure enough, another figure appeared, also moving towards the service station.

  Maybe it was the previous night’s drinking session, maybe it was the morphine, maybe it was just three overactive imaginations. Or maybe it was real; given the way my life had panned out up to that point, I could accept anything.

  Dan let go with a nervous laugh. ‘This isn’t hap- pening,’ he said, and started to back away from the glass. ‘Morphine or no morphine, they are not zombies, and this town is not deserted and I am definitely imagining all this,’ I said.

  Matt looked really excited. ‘I hope they are zombies,’ he said, eyeing a tyre iron by the fridge.

  ‘AARGH.’ Our heads snapped back to the window. The first figure was now passing our truck, still stumbling, hands outstretched; we could now see its face, covered in blood.

  ‘Zombies.’ Matt was up on the balls of his feet, as if realising this situation was ridiculous but ready to do something anyway. Dan’s ice cream had melted down his hand, making a mess on the floor; he looked like a gay-porn-movie fluffer. I just stood there, waiting for an adult to come in and tell me what to do. We were all frozen to the spot.

  The first zombie, a middle-aged woman in a ripped blue dress, pushed the door open, walked up to the empty counter and demanded a pack of Winfield Red cigarettes. At the same time a young guy came running through the back door. ‘Bloody weather.’ He stopped at the counter and took in the scene. Three out-of-towners obviously on drugs, and a zombie.

  ‘WINNIE RED,’ said the zombie.

  ‘OK, OK, keep your hair on. You’ve been fighting again?’

  The zombie ignored this. ‘WINNIE RED.’

  The guy put the pack down on the counter. The zombie opened its mouth, stuck its thumb and forefinger in up to the knuckle, and produced a gooey blood-soaked ten-dollar bill and some change.

  ‘I’ve told you before about this, we don’t accept money that’s been in your body,’ said the service station guy.

  The zombie snatched up the packet quick as a flash and stumbled out.

  ‘Any fuel, fellas?’ asked the service station guy, switching his attention to us. He looked at Dan. ‘Something wrong with the ice cream, mate?’ he asked pointedly.

  Dan snapped back to attention. ‘Oh, sorry.’

  ‘No worries, I’ll clean that up,’ the servo guy said.

  ‘We need diesel on pump four.’ I smiled, and went out to fill up the truck.

  As we drove out of town Matt laughed for a full ten minutes. Every now and again I’d hear ‘WINNIE RED’ and he’d start laughing again. We stopped again in zombie-free Adelaide River for chips and diesel, finally arriving in Darwin in the late afternoon.

  Matty had done a sterling job: he’d driven 1000 k’s in one day, evaded zombies, done Dan’s head in, and successfully taken the non-stop piss out of me the whole time.

  I was so happy to see Clare and Lola, who were waiting for us at the hotel. I couldn’t hug Lola enough. It was a good hotel too, the Holiday Inn, not a sweaty donga, or a flea-bitten motel room with stained carpet. This place had stars after its name. There are two Holiday Inns in Darwin, right next door to each other; Matty and Dan were in the same one as us, and Gavin Kelly, incoming support-truck driver and steadfast Scotsman, was flying in the next day and would be staying in the one next door. I spent the first night telling Clare all about the trip from Sydney while trying to ignore the pain that was slowly creeping back as the morphine left my system. But that night the pain was persistent and I had trouble sleeping. I concentrated on making it through the night. Tomorrow was a new day in the Top End, and would bring a 9 a.m. appointment with the physiotherapist.

 
; It took me half an hour to hobble the two blocks from the hotel to the physiotherapist’s office, Darwin’s heat and humidity already making me sweat. I sat there in the waiting room, and waited. I picked up a five-year-old copy of National Geographic and pretended to read, but I was too nervous: this session was going to hurt, no question. A door opened down the hall, and the receptionist swivelled her head to look, turned to me, made eye contact: this was it. ‘Mr Carter, you can go through now.’ I faked a smile and slowly stood up. Rounding the corner I nearly bumped into the physio.

  ‘Hi, my name’s James, come through.’

  I hobbled in behind him and he gestured towards a seat next to his desk.

  ‘OK, you’ve asked for five days of physiotherapy following a motorcycle crash in Longreach about a week ago.’ He flicked through some notes and looked me in the eye. A clean-cut guy in his mid twenties, he seemed well briefed and genuinely concerned. ‘Did you bring your X-rays from the hospital?’ I had them with me on disc.

  After taking a good look he asked me to stand up and strip. I told him where it hurt, turned my head here and there, bent my arm up and down, did the hokey pokey and turned around, got on the bed and put my face in the hole. So far, so good: he was very thorough and explained what was going on in my body.

  ‘OK, James, when can I get back on the bike?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s hard to say. If you stick with the swimming exercises I outlined, we’ll see how you are in a few days.’

  ‘So when’s it going to hurt?’ I asked.

  ‘Now,’ he said, and pressed down on my shoulder.

  At first impression he was all about a warm handshake, but this turned into a cold kick in the balls for the next hour. ‘You do have a high pain threshold,’ James said happily, making my leg fit into my ear while I spat phlegm at the ceiling and slapped my hand down on the vinyl. I know I piss and moan a lot; it’s one of my coping mechanisms.