The Crying Place

by Lia Hills

  The road played tag with the verge of the rain.

  Licked at it.

  Everything smelt firmer now there was water in the air.

  And for a moment I gave way to the mercy of doubt – that things could be otherwise, that there was no such thing as rupture. I could pull over, turn around, point my car towards Sydney and be back for work on Monday. Or book a flight to Hobart and arrive in time for the funeral, stand beside my mother, dutiful son, dutiful friend – the way it’s meant to be done – the tragedy contained.

  In the back of my mind played my father’s voice, the only clear counsel he’d ever given in a career of laissez-faire parenting. A man lets things take care of themselves. Jed was just a mate. People die. It’s the only safe bet.

  But it was the way he’d died, what had become of him. The unshakable belief that we were as tied now as we’d ever been.

  When the drops finally began, they tapped and raced up the glass, cold draughts forced through gaps in the rusting chassis. The flashes veered to the south, the storm tooth-edged, the weather personal now like so often when it counts: weddings, funerals, moments of liminality.

  I turned my headlights on. Clenched the steering wheel each time the wind tried to evict me from the highway. As I got closer to the South Australian border the names on the signs began to alter – Never-Never Road, Eden Hope, The Inland Way: a road turned to allegory.

  By the time I got to Bordertown, my arse had started to warp to the shape of the seat, and my legs felt so edgy I ran down to the river. Past the grey nomads lined up in the dirt car park, a tin city on wheels, enough been-there stickers to wallpaper a small house.

  The sun sifted through the trees, replicated their forms on the water. I stood quiet for a bit, watching the roiling eddies on the otherwise smooth surface. Rivers had a way of doing that, insinuating what lay beneath – the refuse, the debris from a thousand rainstorms, the channelled lay of the land – like a history, one that remained concealed but that forever sent out its ripples.

  I pitched a stone into the water. Gave thought to where I’d spend the night as it disappeared. In the back of my car again, probably somewhere on the other side of Adelaide, the idea of a motel too brick-veneer. Besides, with the time I was taking off I’d need to be careful with my money.

  A group of teenagers funnelled out of the supermarket opposite, all chips and Coke and hoodies, one of the kids jumping on an empty can, pulverising it. He leant back against a trolley, arms folded, chin raised, as if a border-town car park was the only dominion a man could ever want.

  As night fell, the cats’ eyes took over the road. The only sign of life in the towns I passed was in the hotels, cars lined up faithfully beneath watchful streetlamps. I could’ve pulled up outside one, stretched my legs, drunk a pint or two. Found myself a barfly therapist.

  But I needed to keep my wits about me. Stay focused on the job at hand.

  Drive to arrive, it said on the way out of Coomandook.

  12

  Bridgewater looked colonial in the dawn light, trees red, gold, liquidambar, like a transplanted version of what the world should be, wet leaves bonded to my windscreen. I ducked into a toilet block at the edge of the oval where I’d camped, my boots scraping on the concrete as I washed the road and the night out of my face, something of the thrashed dog in the eyes that looked back. Best to get moving before the soccer mums turned up.

  I headed for the freeway – direction Adelaide – past empty churches and other stone buildings, mostly rough-hewn. As the road dipped I was plunged into fog, suddenly reminded of a winter’s morning in Scotland, hitching alone near Loch Ness. Mist skidding at the edges of the road, the driver – an extra in Highlander he’d said, an age ago – had told me about the ghosts that inhabited different bends, his huge body closely framed by the van which was so poorly insulated that each of our words was a cloud.

  Ghosts?

  Aye, souls that got misplaced along the way.

  The road cut through orange earth as it descended towards the city, leaving the flanking hills behind, joggers and Sunday morning cyclists everywhere in their fluoro lycra, the unhealthy residents still asleep. I passed a motel called Sands, the ripples of the verandah cladding suggestive of dunes, the font of Vegas, but there were still no signs indicating where the road north lay, only a dog lying on a porch, paws flat in front of it like a sphinx, nose pointed towards what I could only assume was the direction of the desert.

  The highway out was similar to the one leading in. But this time I sensed the continent before me, the artery that leads from south to north, dividing the country in half. As the city thinned, I passed white salt pans, the outskirts all giant Winnebagos and campervan dealers and scrawny palm trees, even a field with ponies and a cactus, some kind of California dreaming on the fringe of holy suburbia. An old cannon faced the ranges to the north, the last bastion. The sky was pale but clear, dotted with clouds that looked more like smoke signals than rain. I tried my heater but it spat debris at me. Desisted. A sign announced Flinders Ranges/Outback.

  Outback.

  Show me where it is, our social science teacher, Mr Swan, had once demanded, a thick finger stabbing the map on the wall. We’d all leant forwards, determined to get one over the smug bastard who had a different take on our ignorance from most of the others – he didn’t see it as a right. He’d called Jed’s name and Jed had nudged me and sauntered up to the front of the class like a lawman with a posse in tow. With the palm of his hand, he’d described the place that had neither marking nor defining colour, except maybe the yellow that dominated the centre of the map, the word Outback not written anywhere. We’d all nodded in solidarity of course, even though most of us got what Swan meant – that some places don’t exist on paper. That night I’d gone home and tried the same trick on my dad. He’d led me to the toilet where the map of Australia graced the wall, and he’d traced his own boundaries: the limits of the known. He ran a smoke-stained finger around the centre of the great island that lay north of our small one, that dog’s head of a continent we called The Mainland. He’d never been to those deserts. Maybe nobody in our family ever had. But, fake lavender vying with stale piss, he’d told me the story of Sturt carrying a boat across the desert on his journey to find the fabled inland sea. Got so lost in his recounting that it had taken my mother calling us to dinner to bring him back. She’d shaken her head at the two of us huddled between the pine-panelled walls, the fan whirring like a lost soul.

  The map I’d bought at the op shop was in my glove box, roughly the same vintage as the one that had lent our loo scope. But there was only one road and I knew where it was headed. All I had to do was keep following it and eventually I’d get where I was going.

  To the east lay a small lake, its steely surface broken by whitecaps. I looked for a sign but there was none; a body of water without a name. As I drove up its western shore, candidates suggested themselves: Lake Balding, after its receding shoreline; Corella, five of them perched white as spectres in a dead tree.

  Maybe that was what Swan had meant all along. A place without a name was unnavigable. As elusive as a waning dream. Or was he hinting at something darker, his palm pressed firmly against that map, obscuring a space defined only by ranges and vast stretches of sand?

  No naming could ever protect you from the myth in which it had become shrouded.

  From the way it called you in.

  13

  We entered via the arse end of the ship. Revved our bikes over the ramp and into its steel bowels, the ship lurching as if taken unawares. The coast had kept us company all the way to Algeciras and the ferry that was to carry us across the Strait of Gibraltar. Looming around us in the hold were tall trucks and four-wheel drives with sand ladders, Moroccan cars returning laden with the spoils of the West – TV screens and doonas and rainbow-tasselled kids’ bikes – the women kohl-eyed and loud, the men wrapped in padded jackets but still mere shadows of their wives. Crew secured the bikes with thick orang
e straps, looping them through hooks in the floor, Jed watching them like a hawk. Then we pocketed our few valuables, the GPS, the fake Carnets de Passage, and climbed up to the deck, the air rank with salt and diesel, gulls hovering immigrants.

  On the other side was Africa and the desert.

  Sprawling.

  Unknowable.

  A mere twenty kilometres away.

  As we watched the choppy waters of the strait passing into our wake, Jed related a story Sebastián had told him about a place in the Libyan desert called Kaf Ajnoun. The Mountain of Ghosts. How the Tuareg wouldn’t climb it because they believed it was inhabited by jinns who’d once held council there, voices often heard descending from the fortress-shaped rocks, beings encountered that turned out not to be human. The story went that there was an explorer who’d lost his way there, got so thirsty he’d cut a vein and drunk his own blood. Sebastián had visited the place himself, alone, unable to find a local to accompany him. He’d not seen any ghosts, but the wind had stolen around a rock near the summit and taken on the voice of his late grandmother. He hadn’t hung around.

  Done talking, Jed leant over the railing and spat into the water – the white gob lost in the spume – while I conjured the invisible line beneath.

  The one that divided landmass from landmass.

  History from lore.

  Conrad’s dark continent from the one of the Enlightenment.

  14

  The odometer hit one thousand kilometres just after Port Pirie, a smelter town with shops selling synthetic lawn with names like Toorak, the cornerstones of the old houses painted in dark colours as if the mere fact that they were holding together in such harsh territory required emphasis. I stretched my legs into the perfection of the number – allowed the mathematics of the road to impose its logic – a factory with a single massive chimney sitting like a muted beast on the plain.

  At Port Augusta, I headed over the bridge and down to a pier to eat the Vietnamese rice paper rolls I’d bought in town. Pulled up next to a bench by some saltbush, the wind warm, the dipping sauce generic. At the end of the pier were three boys in bright-coloured board shorts, their hair wet. One of them had a green plastic spool, his line dangling over the edge. I chucked the last of my rice paper roll to a seagull hovering above a post, a squawking seraph, as the smallest boy turned his body into an arrow and dived sideways into the water, his dark skin reflecting the sun.

  As I made my way to the end of the pier, the boys checked my progress without turning to look. Two of them, the divers, shoved past me as they chased each other to the end and back.

  ‘Mitchell,’ shouted one, his voice breaking over the second syllable.

  ‘You caught anything?’ I asked the kid with the line, but he shook his head. ‘What you using for bait?’

  ‘Cockles.’

  ‘Are they your brothers?’ I asked, though they didn’t really look like him; his face was flatter, broader, his forehead almost as dark as his hair.

  ‘No, he’s my uncle,’ the boy said, pointing to the one called Mitchell.

  ‘And the other guy?’

  ‘Cousin.’

  This was the first time I’d ever really spoken to an Aboriginal kid, except for a girl I’d known back in high school. I was twelve when she’d told me and I’d had trouble getting my head around the fact because she lived down the street from us in a white weatherboard with ceramic ducks on the front wall, and with her blue eyes and blazing red hair she’d looked more like Sheena Easton to me than any of the Tasmanian Aborigines in our history textbook. This kid – the one using cockles for bait – had a blue tint to the black of his skin, and his tongue flattened his consonants as if it wanted nothing to do with the roof of his mouth, like an elder from Darwin I’d once heard interviewed on radio about deaths in custody.

  ‘Hope you catch something,’ I said.

  He nodded in thanks. Returned to his line that cut through the brown water like a wire through clay. The kid called Mitchell came over, his muscles lean but precise, his movements jaunty. Stood between me and the boy fishing.

  ‘You live here?’ he asked, tugging at his ear.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where d’ya live, then?’

  ‘Sydney, at the moment.’

  ‘Is that where you’re going?’

  ‘No. I’m going to Alice.’

  ‘Why?’ He cocked his head. He could go all afternoon like that if I didn’t stop him.

  ‘Because sometimes an answer is geographically located,’ I said.

  He frowned, the ridges fleshy on his forehead. Then he grabbed his cousin or nephew or whatever he was, a small boy with huge eyes and dark curls so fine they’d dreadlocked at the ends. Raised his eyebrows at me and said, ‘Help me push him in.’

  I stepped back and shook my head.

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said the little guy.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked him, his heels halfway over the edge.

  ‘Amos.’

  Mitchell shoved him, tried to obstruct his view of me. But Amos wove around the blocks. Said something that I didn’t quite catch.

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked him.

  His feet grappling for a hold, he managed to clear Mitchell’s shoulder long enough to make himself heard.

  ‘Take me to Alice,’ he said.

  I stared at him, his eyes too big for his face, something about him reminding me of us as kids. Resistance in every sinew. Slack-jawed bravado. The certainty that what we wanted lay elsewhere.

  ‘Take me to Alice,’ he repeated, an echo of another language in the way he pronounced the name.

  And for a moment, it seemed like the perfect idea. A bit of company on the road. Offer a kid what nobody had ever offered us. But then reason kicked in.

  ‘Sorry, mate. I can’t.’

  Amos turned up his lip. Grinned as if I’d just confirmed something he’d always suspected. Breaking free of the older boy’s grasp, he hovered at the edge. Dived sideways, arms a spear, his eyes still on me, mocking, entreating.

  The water quivered.

  Opened up.

  Closed around him, as if its surface had never been breached.

  15

  Back at the car, I spread the map out on the bonnet, which was hot enough to fry the proverbial, anchoring it with a couple of rocks. This was the end of the coast, its last jutting finger inland. Maybe it was because I was born by a river, or maybe it ran deeper than that, but quitting the coast felt reckless. Always had. I smoothed out the area to the north of me where Lake Eyre lay. The guy back at the petrol station in Port Pirie had said the track out to it was in good nick, though he’d looked tired of giving advice, of standing at the gateway to other people’s adventures. He’d trotted out something about it being the fourth consecutive year that it was in flood. First time in recorded history, he’d added mechanically. Recorded. Such a legitimising word.

  I traced my finger around the boundaries of Lake Eyre, usually nothing but salt and gypsum. It didn’t look that much further to get to Coober Pedy via the lake’s southern shore instead of by the highway, and I felt it beckoning, as if a bound body of water might elicit a promise in the way that the sea often does. Besides, that was the way Jed had gone when he’d driven north.

  The jetty was empty now, the kids departed with their plastic bucket of spoils. I headed back to the highway, the traffic sparse, replaced by cattle stops, their unruly judder. There was no phone reception anymore so I turned mine off, the battery low. Overtook a road train with three thundering tanks full of combustible liquid and imagined the potential for cataclysm. Something glinted at me from the pink rocks and spinifex that dotted everything now, maybe a smashed bottle or some other broken thing. Not long after, I sighted the first red sand.

  At Pimba, the turnoff to Lake Eyre, I pulled into the roadhouse, the car park more like a runway. A convoy of military vehicles was lined up next to the petrol pumps, a guy behind the wheel of an army ambulance looking
barely sixteen, a bar of an eyebrow the only solid thing about him. I went in, the footy on, licence plates from Queensland, Germany, Alabama lining the counter and the walls, a patchworked reminder that we were a long way from anywhere. I ordered a bag of hot chips and an egg and bacon sandwich from the man behind the counter.

  ‘What’s the road like to the lake?’ I asked him.

  ‘Don’t know, you’ll have to ask the coppers.’

  ‘What kind of car you got?’ asked a voice behind me, over towards the pokies.

  It belonged to a guy in a black t-shirt and shorts, a face that had seen better days.

  ‘The old Subaru Sportswagon parked out front.’

  ‘It’s four-wheel-drive, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Not a problem then. Just look out for the corrugation in the bends after Coward Springs. Take them too fast and you could fly off the road.’ He grinned at the guy behind the counter. ‘Did it on a postie bike a while back. Nearly lost it on that stretch. You travelling alone?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘First time up here?’

  ‘Yep.’

  He scratched his chin. Seemed to be deciding whether I was a dickhead or worthy of his attention. A silver dagger hung from his left earlobe.

  ‘You’ll be right,’ he said. ‘Clearance isn’t good on those old Subarus, so just watch your speed on the dips.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, allowing him to make the final decision for me.

  Nodding, he returned to the disco lights of the pokies, a woman waiting for him, a weary look to her, as if all she expected was reruns.

  Beyond the toilets and the rack of shiny chip packets was the camping equipment: cast-iron ovens, jerry cans, blue tarps, three different types of gas lamp. I selected a shit shovel, a jerry can for water and an axe, plus a map with more detail and a foot in this century, Maralinga marked to the north-west. Put them all on the credit card too. Tried to remember how much I had left on it.