As if she could read my mind, Carrie opened her window to create a passage of air.
Darcy’s leg was pressed hard against mine and I tried to move away, but there was nowhere to go.
Arden put on a CD that she found stuffed in the overhead parcel shelf. She turned the volume up loud and sang tunelessly.
It was a song I hadn’t heard for a long time. Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. Vivienne had loved it—the Jeff Buckley version—and I couldn’t hear it without imagining a tortured man walking into a river to end it all. She’d joked that he was a long-lost relative of ours.
There was an ache in my chest. Tears were running down my cheeks. I had only ever had one eye that cried—the left, as if I was half-committed to the act—but now there were twin streams and I couldn’t stop. I wound down the window and hung my head out. My tears skidded off like raindrops on a windscreen.
‘We had a dog that used to do that,’ Carrie said looking over at me. ‘His lips used to flap like this.’ She pinched her lips and lifted them. Her fangs gleamed. She put her head out of the window and waggled her lips up and down.
I smiled at her. I knew she’d seen me cry, but she wasn’t telling. I was grateful for it.
‘Put the window up unless you’re gonna puke,’ Arden said.
I fell asleep with my head on Darcy’s shoulder, too tired to care.
The moon followed us the whole way. The landscape was nothing I hadn’t seen a thousand times, but you’d think AiAi had never seen a cow before, the way he yelped every time we passed a farm animal. Halfway through the night, after long hours of nothing but pitch-dark plains and the occasional farmhouse, Malik pulled into a 24-hour service station.
Arden gave Carrie some money and a bag and told her to stock up on drinks and chips.
Malik filled up the tank and scraped dead bugs off the windscreen.
I climbed out to stretch my legs. When I walked past, Malik flicked the gunk he’d scraped off in my direction.
Arden gave me a look.
The others got out, too. We used the toilets, then mooched around in the car park. Apart from a few truckies in the restaurant, we seemed to be the only living creatures out there.
We dawdled, reluctant to get back in the car.
‘How much further do we have to go?’ Darcy yawned and stretched her arms so far behind her back she looked double-jointed.
A double-B road train passed and whipped up a flurry of dust and styrofoam cups.
‘It’s all starting to look the same to me,’ Carrie chimed in. ‘Road, paddock, tree, cow, road, paddock, tree…’
As for me, it felt like heading home.
Malik drove for a couple more hours until morning. When we passed a rundown caravan park, Arden yelled at him to stop. She seemed transfixed by the rusting metal archway, the peeling paint, the sad little caravans parked in rows. The park sign read ‘Ploser’s Family Caravan Park’.
‘I think I’ve been here before,’ she said.
‘They all look the same to me,’ Joe answered.
‘I want to have a look.’
Over the next couple of hours we took turns sneaking showers using a key that Arden ‘borrowed’ from a teenage boy. Some money changed hands. I showered with Carrie chattering incessantly in the next cubicle while the water ran grey from my filthy hair and skin. Afterwards, we played pool and pinball in the communal games room and ate melting chocolate from a vending machine.
Arden sat apart, watching us.
Silence stayed away from her.
‘I know I’ve been here before,’ she said to no one in particular when we were leaving. ‘I’m sure my parents brought us here when I was a kid. Maybe we always want to go back to the last place we were happy.’
She didn’t seem to need an answer. As we took turns sneaking past the office, she pulled out a thick, black Texta from her bag and crossed out the ‘P’ and the word ‘family’.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The troop carrier limped in at dusk.
Behind us, the sky was bleeding out. A derelict black-and-white sign hung at an angle, complete with a bullet hole and a smear of something brown and unmentionable. Murungal Creek, it told us, glowing neon in the headlights. Dust and half-light set a milky cast over everything. The road snaked away, crumbling to nothing, past ancient river red gums that reached up into the deep, dark blue.
When the dust cleared, we were all crawling over each other to peer through the windows. To see what had drawn Arden to this place.
It was a town left behind.
Buildings leaned like tombstones; walls gaped with cracks. There was a double-storey white building on a corner that could have been a pub, a tin shed with a bowed porch, several identical squat houses that looked like they’d been pressed out of the same plasterboard mould, and a regal church with a soaring spire. Piles of slate and rubble in between, lesser things, reclaimed by the land.
We got out of the car, stretching and groaning. There seemed more than nine of us now, unfolded. I took a gulp of pure air that wasn’t somebody else’s exhalation. It tasted of eucalyptus.
There were signs everywhere. Keep Out. Trespassers Prosecuted. Private Property. Tags, too, garish and out of place. Old water tanks crusted with rust, jagged fence posts linked with drooping wire, shuttered windows and the taint of green, the spreading, noxious green of rot and rain.
‘This is it,’ Arden sighed. ‘It looks just like the picture. You know how sometimes the pictures are just too perfect? Not this, though. It’s exactly how I thought it would be.’
I remembered the postcards on Arden’s wall. This is what she’d been planning?
‘There’s nobody here,’ Joe said. ‘It looks like a godforsaken ghost town.’
‘It is a fucking ghost town, you knob,’ Arden snapped. ‘I told you guys all about it.’
‘You said we were going to find our own place.’
‘This is even better—I got you a whole town.’
‘It’s a ghost town. What’s the point? There’s not even a pub.’
Arden sighed. ‘There probably was one a long time ago. We can make our own pub. That’s the whole point. We can do whatever we want.’
‘You can’t just claim a town and move in,’ I said.
‘Why not? Obviously nobody else wants it,’ she fired back. ‘And it’s a hundred kays from anywhere. Perfect.’
‘There’s no power,’ Darcy said. ‘How will we boil the kettle?’
‘Jesus!’ Arden exploded. ‘We’ll survive. We always do. Here or back there,’ she pointed to the distance. ‘What’s the difference? I’ll tell you what—here, there’s just us. Nobody else. No one to tell us what to do. We don’t have to creep around or watch our backs.’
‘The difference is we’re a hundred kilometres from anywhere and that makes me nervous,’ Joe admitted. ‘How are we supposed to make money or buy what we need?’ There was a chorus of nods.
‘We have a car.’
‘A stolen car. How long before we’re picked up?’
‘Malik switched the plates. Nobody will know it’s stolen. And I have money,’ Arden said.
‘That’s our money, too,’ AiAi said, his bottom lip sticking out.
‘Of course it’s our money,’ Arden placated him. ‘We have plenty of the stuff. This is what we’ve all worked so hard for. Our own place. All we need to worry about right now is where we’re all going to sleep tonight. Then we can get started and fix this place up.’
‘Yeah, let’s call it “Shithole Makeover”. Then we’ll just nip down to the hardware store and pick up everything we need,’ Joe said. ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere, in case you hadn’t noticed. The last piece of civilisation we passed through had a ten-metre tall friggin’ monument to a sheep. That’s gotta tell you something about the locals, don’t you think?’
‘Shut up, Joe,’ Malik said through his teeth.
I think we were all grateful that Joe was voicing group opinion. What the hell were we doing the
re in an abandoned town? It was picturesque and peaceful, but people didn’t just up and leave houses and churches and livelihoods for no good reason.
‘What does it mean, Murungal?’ Malik asked. Muh-run-gal, is how he said it.
We all turned to Bree, figuring she’d know more than the rest of us with our mongrel pedigrees and shallow histories. I wanted to hear her say it, with her warm rolling consonants like a mouthful of cobblers.
Bree looked up. Sunset was rolling in, a distant shore in the sky. She lit a cigarette. ‘Why are you asking me? How the fuck would I know?’ She exhaled, slit-eyed against the smoke.
‘Murungal,’ I say. Moo-roong-garl. ‘It means…’
Arden cut me off with a dirty look. It turned into an expression I hadn’t seen before—as if she’d come to a conclusion and was filing it away in her steel-trap mind, for later.
Bree stalked off to inspect a boarded-up window.
‘Sorry,’ I shrugged.
‘What does it mean?’ Silence rasped behind me.
‘Well, let’s get unpacked, shall we?’ Arden interrupted. She sounded like a schoolteacher. ‘What’s first?’
‘Food,’ said Malik.
‘Food,’ seconded Carrie.
‘Beer,’ said AiAi.
Arden snorted. ‘No, shelter.’
‘Well, take your pick,’ Joe said and gestured at the collapsing buildings.
‘Water,’ I said, under my breath.
I could tell by looking that there wasn’t much of that here. It had rained, a lot and recently, but the red dust had soaked it up like a dry sponge. Boring through metres of rock would have been the only way to dredge a drop back. There was an old windmill missing two blades but it didn’t look as if it had turned a single rotation for a century. A full twenty-litre water container was stashed in the back of the car but I figured that might last us a day, two at best.
‘We need water,’ I said loudly.
‘We have water,’ Arden said.
‘Well, how long are we staying?’
She looked at me as if the answer was elementary and I was stupid. ‘We’ve been planning this for a long time.’
‘Then we need more water.’
‘So do a rain dance. Come on, let’s get unpacked. We’ll worry about it tomorrow.’
‘It’s going to get cold. I’ll make us a fire,’ I said. It was more to give myself something to do than anything.
Silence, Darcy and Malik looked at me as if I’d just beamed down from a UFO. ‘What?’ I shrugged.
I headed off past the buildings into a dense cluster of scrubby gums, scraped together an armful of thin, dead branches and made a pile in the clearing next to the church. AiAi helped—or hindered—by dragging the biggest, still-green branches he could handle. The sticks I’d collected were damp, but they’d burn well enough once they got going.
A smouldering half-sun floated on the horizon and soon there would be little or no light, only a crescent moon. The cold was creeping in. I stopped to catch my breath and stared at the opal-streaked sky.
Joe might have called that place godforsaken but I could see a whole lot of proof that if there was a God, He’d been there. I’d missed it—the way the outback lit up in dying light. The stillness, the colour. Out there, a quiet moment to yourself could feel like forever, but at the same time you were reminded that your entire life so far was barely a blink.
In the background, Darcy and Carrie started bickering and I was yanked back into the present. The others had unpacked the car and stacked everything on the ground near the church entrance. I should have told them to leave it all in the car; it was a dewy night and it would all be wet in the morning. Not that Arden was ever in a mood for advice.
I scraped out a shallow basin in the dust using an old hubcap and ringed it with glowing-white chunks of limestone rock. Then came the Blair Witch pile of sticks in the centre, ready for the flame. It was a ritual I could do in my sleep—there was something almost religious about building a fire.
AiAi whipped out a lighter and tried to ignite the sticks. I let him go for it, confident that it wouldn’t catch, so he couldn’t burn himself.
There was a plentiful supply of old mallee stumps close by. It told me there hadn’t been too many people around to build a campfire. I found a good half-dozen and started hauling them back to the fire pit. Often there’s just a small, telltale piece sticking out above the ground but underneath there’s a whole knotty, gnarled mass. Mallee burns long and slowly through cold nights.
AiAi followed me around.
‘Kick them,’ I told him. ‘They’re like icebergs—all hidden underneath. If it’s dead and dry it’ll come loose. If it won’t come up it’s probably still growing.’
He kicked, too hard, and rubbed his foot.
I laughed and he didn’t seem to mind. He wandered away with his hands in his pockets, scouring the ground.
Silence joined me. It was the first time we’d been alone in the same space for a while.
‘You okay?’ I asked.
He nodded and mirrored my actions, kicking stumps, but with a lot less enthusiasm.
‘Did you know she was going to bring us here?’
Yes.
‘A place to call her own.’ I snorted.
Silence made the same sound in his throat and we laughed together.
‘Do you think you’ll ever tell me what happened to you the other night?
His smile froze. He nodded, a tiny movement. One day. He looked over his shoulder at the others.
They’d discovered the fire pit. Darcy and Carrie stomped around it in a bad parody of an Aboriginal dance.
Bree stood off to the side with a blank expression that said a lot.
‘Let’s light this sucker,’ I said and grabbed his hand. ‘Come on. I just need some newspaper.’
Arden, it seemed, had thought of everything. That tarp in the cellar had hidden a cache of camping and survival gear that could have stocked an underground bunker in preparation for Armageddon. A couple of eskies full of food, another full container of water, nine army-green swags, more fuel, cans of insecticide, chairs, a portable stove, even bulk packets of toilet paper. I counted seven slabs of beer and four heavy-duty torches. Apart from a layer of road-dust, everything looked brand-new, the tags still on.
But no newspaper.
‘The toilet paper will do it,’ I said.
Silence pressed his notebook into my hand.
‘Cool,’ I said and flipped to the back of the book.
Silence snapped it shut and shoved it towards my chest. ‘Burn it,’ he said, quite clearly.
‘No.’ I tore out a few blank pages and handed it back to him. ‘You might need it.’ I screwed the pages into twists and stuffed them into the cracks beneath the pile of sticks. Soon, a racing flame was taking hold.
Arden watched our exchange with tight lips. She had a beer in one hand, a plastic cup in the other. She saw me looking and said, ‘Rainwater. The tanks are full of the stuff. See? Mother nature provides.’
‘Don’t drink it,’ I said quickly. ‘It needs to be purified.’ I got busy building up the fire with larger pieces of wood.
‘It’s clean,’ Arden said and held her cup up to the flickering light. ‘Crystal. We used to drink from our rainwater tanks all the time.’
‘These tanks probably have rust or shit or dead animals floating in them,’ I said carefully, without looking at her. ‘Quickest way to gastro and dehydration out here.’
Carrie, squashed into a deckchair, turned and spat water into the dust. ‘You said it was okay to drink.’
‘Listen to Bear fucking Grylls,’ Arden sneered. ‘Look.’
Arden tilted the cup, poured a tiny amount between her lips. She held the mouthful for a microsecond, the barest hesitation, then she swallowed. ‘Ah,’ she gasped. She grabbed her throat, made a gurgling sound, fell into Malik’s lap and went limp.
AiAi looked around at each of us before he realised it was an act. He laughed.
After burnt baked beans and too many beers, the next few hours were a comedy of falling-down pee-stops in the dark. Carrie stumbled back with spattered jeans, scratched arms and an expression like an axe murderer was on her tail. Darcy made Joe go with her and hold the torch.
The fire burned down to a pleasant glow.
‘Where are we going to sleep?’ Darcy slurred.
‘In the church,’ Arden said. ‘It’s the only place with a decent roof.’
Nobody spoke. They were all looking at me. Even Darcy.
‘I’m just going to sleep out here,’ I said.
I rolled out my swag a few metres from the fire and arranged my bag and pillow. The canvas was so old, so deeply ingrained with dust and ash and oil, that water rolled right off.
The others followed, until the campfire was surrounded. Malik did the same but set up his swag further away from the rest of us.
Arden sat on the bonnet of the car for ages, smoking, alone.
‘If I need the toilet in the night, will you come with me?’ Carrie whispered and burrowed deeper in her sleeping bag.
‘Sure,’ I said.
Why she was so freaked out? It wasn’t like the city. There was nothing out there to be afraid of.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I loved the morning light the best. It seeped in, a one-way tide; it coloured in dark spaces until the land was flooded with silver light. The magpies’ song began while it was still dark. I’d been lying awake for more than an hour. I sat up. My muscles were cramped and stiff and my head throbbed with the sudden blood-rush.
The others were still sleeping.
I crawled out of the swag, stretched out my kinks and looked for a private place to pee behind the church. I squatted on wobbly legs next to an old lean-to stacked with rotting wood. It had been cold overnight, but not enough to keep me awake. The landscape sparkled with crystals of ice and I heard the steady drip-drip of melting droplets on tin. Beyond the lean-to there was a beached, battered rowboat next to a pile of planks, a rusted axe poised mid-chop in the trunk of a tree, and a porcelain toilet bowl standing by itself in a circle of stones. A coil of barbed wire was a trap for tumbleweed. It was a scene frozen in time as if only yesterday it had been the land of the living.
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