The women would nod. Invite her for tea and cake. But eventually her bitter streak got the better of her and the invitations ceased, and not even Flinch looking pitiful in his leather and metal brace could convince the ladies to start offering them again.
The bus stop is near the train station. The trains from Sydney grind to a stop here. None continue into Queensland. Different states, different systems. Flinch has heard the width of the tracks isn’t even the same size. Brisbane is closer to the bay than Sydney, but it’s a disjointed bloody country, the roads out from the capital cities in every state look like rays from a sun. Nothing connects. The colonisers never imagined the roads ever would over such a vast dry land.
He sits on his suitcase in the shade of a fig tree. The dust around him rises when a car rattles past, but otherwise it is still. Across the road and down at the Great Northern, the television blares out racing commentary. Through the open veranda doors, as he walked past, Flinch had seen a couple of blokes perched on stools near the bar, beers and elbows resting on soggy towelling mats. They’re in navy singlets and faded shorts that sag around their hips, revealing their bum cracks when they lean forward to put out their cigarettes in the ashtray. It’s almost a uniform, in summer, for the working men around here. Flannelette shirts are about the only variation for winter. It’s an hour until his bus departs, and Flinch is tempted to cross the road and down a schooner or two himself, but he is nervous about missing his ride; the bus might turn up early and leave without him, and he can’t afford another ticket.
But the bus is late. When it finally shudders to a dusty halt at the side of the road, Flinch’s buttocks are numb from sitting on his suitcase. He stands as the bus stops, and the driver snatches the case from him and throws it into the storage compartment with a thud. Flinch is grateful he didn’t pack anything breakable.
‘You need a hand getting on, mate?’ the driver says when he notices Flinch hobbling towards the door.
‘No, I’m right thanks, mate,’ says Flinch. He takes extra care to lift his short leg high onto the bus steps, clings to the handrail.
The driver watches him in the rear-vision mirror. Waits until he’s seated before taking off, the bus exhaling as the brake releases.
There are other passengers already on the bus. Must have come up from Sydney, Flinch decides. They’ve probably been crammed into their seats for over twelve hours. They don’t pay any attention to him. Most of them have taken off their shoes, spread jackets over the seats next to them. Empty chip packets trapped against windows flutter and a soft drink bottle rolls around on the aisle floor. Some of the travellers are asleep. Most look dishevelled. Flinch tries to settle in. At times like this, he’s glad he’s a small man. Nate, lanky and lean, would have had to fold himself twice over in a seat this size. Flinch wonders if he came to the bay this way, his knees jutting into the seat in front of him, his hair tangling in his sleep, waking whenever the bus braked.
The trip to Brisbane takes a few hours. The bus labours up over the hills, through the rainforest and farming communities, places with names like Mooball and Murwillumbah. They have a rest stop at the Gold Coast, at a terminal in Surfers Paradise. Flinch stretches his legs, instinctively walks towards the ocean. A cluster of shiny high-rises shadow the beach. It is late afternoon, but the sunbakers are still out, stretched bronze and oily on pastel towels. They look like plastic figurines. The whole place looks plastic, lurid aqua and pink painted buildings, lights and advertisements. Like a movie set, Flinch thinks. Somewhere designed to look bigger and brighter than itself, so that visitors can act however they want when they get here, because it’s all fake, there’s no connection to their real lives. He hurries back to the bus.
When they arrive in Brisbane, it is dark. Flinch hasn’t been to the city. Any city. He asks the bus driver if he knows of a cheap hotel nearby. The bus driver snorts.
‘They’re all cheap around this part of town, son. The nicer ones are in the centre. Cost you a few bucks in a cab if you want to head in there.’
‘No,’ says Flinch. ‘Something round here is fine. I have to be on a train tomorrow.’
‘Righto, then. Try the Grandview across the road. They usually have a good rate going for travellers.’
Flinch takes his case from the bus and drags it down the stairs. The hotel is directly across the road from the bus centre so it’s easy for him to get to, though as he stands at its entrance he wonders why they named it the Grandview. It’s not grand, would never have been, and the only view is of the road and the grey stucco side of another building. The lobby smells of old cigarettes and mouldy carpet. Behind the reception desk, a large copper clock ticks loudly, the time on it wrong.
The room is much the same. There had been only smoking rooms left, and Flinch can smell the years of accumulated exhalations on the blankets and the upholstered headboard. The stale ghosts of other travellers.
He doesn’t venture into the city. For dinner he orders a cheese and tomato toasted sandwich, which costs him four times as much as it usually does and arrives cool and soggy with a wilted piece of parsley on the side. He unlocks his case and takes out his pyjamas. Crawls into the bed exhausted, but can’t get to sleep. He takes out the crumpled piece of paper with Nate’s address on it, and flattens it between his palms, fingering it for clues as to how he will find Nate’s mother. If she is still there, in Duchess. If she’s still alive.
Eventually he falls asleep with the bedside lamp on, the piece of paper crunched in his fist.
He arrives two hours early for his train, the wait before him on the empty platform stretching out interminably like a blank page, but he had been forced to check out of his room at the Grandview and he didn’t trust the desk clerk enough to leave his suitcase at the reception and venture into town for what the clerk described as ‘a little look around’. Even from a distance, Flinch is overwhelmed by the gleaming high-rise office buildings, the cars jammed nose to tail at red lights, the commuters that stream out of the train station with dark, shiny suits and hard eyes.
The train slides into the station with a metallic hiss. Flinch, aboard, is relieved to find the seats more spacious than on the bus. He settles himself into one. Exhausted, with nowhere that he has to be for the next twelve or so hours, he sleeps.
When he wakes, it is dusk. The train rockets through fields of sugar cane, the setting sun turning the tips of the stalks pink. A food trolley is on its way up the carriage, and he buys himself a cup of milky tea and ham sandwiches that taste bland and stale. He feels suddenly homesick for the bay, and wonders what is happening at the little pastel house now. He left a bowl of water out for the goats. A little unnecessary, he knows, they’re hardy and resourceful and would survive regardless, but he wanted to connect himself to something there. To something living, something that would remember him. Barrelling along through this foreign landscape, he feels as if his ties to the bay are being stretched too far. He anticipates the snap, the flick and the sharp recoil of them breaking and he huddles in his seat.
There is a dinner service on the train. Meals served in rectangular aluminium containers. He peels the cardboard lid off to reveal stringy grey meat swimming in watery gravy. A few hard whitish peas and a potato. He isn’t hungry but he eats it all anyway. It’s something to do. He stays awake until late. If he presses his forehead against the window he can see the outline of mountains, the silhouettes of trees like dark figures lurking. If he sits back he sees only his reflection, distorted, pale and worried, a face he doesn’t recognise as his own. When he falls asleep, the rocking movement of the train results in dreams of being on a boat, of washing up on a shore lined with broken bottles, all of which contain notes with the names of men lost at sea and their last words, the things they wanted to say to lovers, mothers, brothers. He finds himself again at the lighthouse, and again he is not alone. He turns this time to see the lighthouse keeper filling his pipe. He smells the rich scent of tobacco. The lighthouse keeper points at the lighthouse and it
flashes a brilliant white light.
Flinch wakes with a jolt.
The train has stopped.
‘Nothing to be concerned about,’ the conductor is saying, walking up and down the carriage like an army major. ‘Just a routine stop. You’re not going anywhere yet.’
Flinch covers himself with a blanket and goes back to sleep.
At Townsville, there is more waiting. Six hours in the middle of the day. The air is heavy with humidity. Tastes salty. Flinch imagines that if he stretched his hands out in front of him and wrung them, water would fall at his feet. He sweats constantly. He can smell his own body odour. He fumbles around in his suitcase for a while before he finds his deodorant, spends half an hour in the men’s toilets with his shirt off, trying to freshen up, but even the cold tap runs hot.
He buys a magazine on boating and fishing at the station kiosk. It’s out of date by a month. He reads an article on man-made lures. Makes a note to try to make one when he returns to the bay, maybe ask Macca to try it out when he goes deep-sea fishing. There are advertisements for speedboats and yachts, women in bikinis sprawled across the bows, sipping champagne. Flinch wonders if such a world exists anywhere. Or if people are so easily sold on the concept of paradise. He thinks of the commune and wonders how they are managing, whether they have recreated their Eden. He remembers Karma saying it was paradise, but he didn’t see it himself. And he was glad. If he discovered a paradise, he’d distrust it, something so one-dimensional, just as he distrusted Surfers Paradise with its lurid colours and flashy neon promises. He wonders why she wants it to be that way so desperately. There are people at the commune who are palpably happy. Joyous, even. They look relaxed and fulfilled, brimming with their convictions. They see the commune as an alternative to a life crammed behind a picket fence in the suburbs, only talking to their neighbours when there’s been a crime in the street. They’re the ones who have already spent a bit of time hanging around on the beaches in Goa, smoking dope and dressing in saris. The commune is just the way they have decided to live. They accept that it has its limitations and its triumphs.
But Karma, Flinch has noticed, isn’t one of them. She looks like she’s arrived there to get away from something else, not drawn to the commune but chased in. Hiding in the orange glow of her tent, feverish to heal. Or to be healed. He wants to believe she is interested in his company but suspects with an instinct for truth that her insistence on healing him is just another distraction from whatever is going on inside her.
Mt Isa, burning metal and dust. Flinch stands at the exit from the train station and sees the towers from the mines rising up out of the city like smoking sentinels. Mining cranes hover over the gashes in the distant landscape like long-necked vultures. He doesn’t want to spend much time here. Nate’s father had worked here, Nate had said, but they didn’t live in Mt Isa, his old man preferring a dirt-cheap mortgage and an excuse to spend the working week away from his family, the evenings drinking and whoring in town. Not that Nate had cared anyway, he said; it was a rough place back then. Part oasis, part open wound. Established by a lonely fossicker who had ridden into the place on a horse called Hard Times, the nag’s name like some self-fulfilling prophecy for the town for much of its settlement. It’s a more prosperous place now that the bigger mines are set up. The miners do well and promise their wives just another year, just another year. During the day, the women sit in front of fans and water the wilting palm trees in their front gardens, work the cafes and pubs and hospitals, serve drinks and sew fingers back onto bloodied fists. Bar brawls in the rougher pubs become legend, something to aspire to on the weekends. There’s a bit of spare cash to be had up here, for those willing to stick it out.
Duchess, Nate said, was a scab on the town’s behind, in comparison.
Flinch finds a place that will rent him a car just a short walk from the train station. The girl behind the counter sizes him up and asks him to produce his licence twice before she lets him have the keys. He’s hired a little Datsun. It was the most he could afford and the girl behind the counter assures him it will make the journey.
‘It’s not that far,’ she says. ‘Not much at the end of the road, though.’ She sniffs and wipes her nose on her arm.
‘How do I get there?’ Flinch asks.
‘Take the Duchess road.’ The girl looks at him like he’s got brain damage.
Flinch has brought a block of wood to tie to the clutch, like he does with Milly, and hewaits until the girl has left him alone with the car before he digs through his suitcase to find it. He straps it in place with his belt. His pants hang loose around his hips and when he gets into the car the hot vinyl sears his bare lower back.
He winds down the window. There’s a map in the glove box and he sweats while he marks the roads of his journey with a red marker he brought especially for the purpose. The Datsun, to his delight, starts straight away when he turns the key in the ignition.
The country out here is dry and red. Spinifex and pale gums shimmer silver above the soil. The nests of termites rise out of the ground in the shapes of witches’ hats and stooped men, some of them double the height of Flinch. On the side of the road, and often in the middle, roadkill in various states of decay is splattered, fur and blood and bone one big sizzling mess on the gravel. Crows feast on the hot meat like diners at a banquet, cuss and flap reluctantly to the side of the road when the Datsun passes.
It takes him just over two hours to get to Duchess. The road is hard going on the Datsun and the car is hot and shuddering a little by the time Flinch arrives. Flinch wonders if the girl at the car hire place has ever been out here. There is nothing much of Duchess. Nobody is around. He parks outside the pub. The dust is still rising around him when he gets out of the car.
He is the only person in the pub. He waits quietly propped against the bar for twenty minutes or so before he clears his throat and jangles his keys. A grey-haired woman wanders out from a back room behind the bar. She’s in a singlet that is stretched over saggy breasts and a gut like a man’s, a tea towel over one shoulder, a startled look on her face.
‘How long have you been here?’ she says.
‘A bit,’ says Flinch.
‘You need to sing out,’ she says. ‘We don’t get a lot of drop-ins.’
Flinch nods and puts his keys in his pocket.
‘Beer?’
‘Yeah, ta,’ says Flinch.
The woman slams on a tap and the beer frosts the glass as it is poured.
‘A buck,’ she says. She puts the beer in front of Flinch and he hands over the note, takes a long, hard gulp of his drink, empties it and puts it in front of her. She refills it.
‘Passing through?’ she asks.
‘Kind of. I’m actually looking for someone who lives around here.’
‘Well I know most. Who you after?’
‘The Wests,’ he ventures.
‘Wests. Aw yeah.’ The woman waits.
Flinch drinks his pot and orders another.
‘The Wests live on a little place just a bit further up. Follow the road you’re on, turn right at the first dirt road and then take your second left. It’s the place with the green roof. White paint, what’s left anyway. You from the hospital?’
‘No,’ says Flinch.
‘From palliative care?’
‘Er, no. I’m an old friend of the family.’
The woman grunts.
‘Yeah, well, don’t be expecting to be too long out there. The old man isn’t up for much these days, doesn’t have much energy for anything.’ She lifts her eyebrows. ‘Might be a bit different from the way you remember him, eh?’
‘Yeah,’ says Flinch. ‘Thanks.’
‘No worries. Good luck.’
‘Ta,’ says Flinch. He puts a five-dollar note on the bar as he leaves.
ELEVEN
Flinch follows the woman’s directions, the dust from the dirt road billowing behind the car, clouding his rear-vision mirror. The trees grow sparse, the ones still o
ut here greying in the leaves. Along the way he passes a few small weatherboard houses on stilts, a rotting wooden and corrugated iron shed. But at the end of the road the woman described, he sees the house and knows it must be the one. Cracked green roof, white paint flaking like sunburn to reveal the pale, worn timber underneath. The rusted bodies of two vehicles are in the front yard. A truck of some sort and an old Hillman. Next to them lie dismantled engines, bolts and wires, bits and pieces of twisted metal, as if they have been gutted and left on display as some sort of warning. Flinch drives past the place slowly and pulls up a few hundred metres further on. He hasn’t thought about exactly what he will say to Nate’s parents, and realises now he is here that they too may blame him for Nate’s death, even if he doesn’t confess to it.
The beer has made him light-headed and he needs to pee. He gets out of the car and stumbles over to some nearby shrubs. As the spray lands on them, a scorpion darts out from underneath the shrubs and scuttles away. A crow caws overhead. There is, though, mostly silence, as if layers of dust have settled over everything, weighed down all signs of life. Flinch wonders how Nate spent his time here. Can’t picture him in this environment, all his anxiety and energy like a whirlwind in this still dirt corner. The pages of his books browning with the soil on his fingers.
He returns to the car and reverses the entire way back up the dirt road until he is outside the house. The dust rushes into the car’s open window, almost choking him, making his eyes water. He pulls the handbrake harder than necessary when he stops. He has to brush himself off when he gets out. Spits into the palms of his hands and rubs them through his hair. He walks up the pathway to the house quickly, taking the biggest steps he can manage, so that he doesn’t have time to think about what he’s doing and turn around.
The house sits slightly off the ground, but the steps to the veranda have decayed. Off to the side, there is a makeshift ramp, a couple of planks of wood nailed to the veranda. Flinch walks up them sideways to keep his balance. The front door is unlocked and hinged back. The screen door appears shut, but it moves slightly with the wind, clicking in and out of its latch.
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