by Lia Hills
Outside, the petrol pumps were deserted, the army and the kid with the monobrow gone.
‘Time to get moving, kiddo,’ I said.
•
It was another ninety k’s before I hit dirt road, the Olympic Way that eventually joined the legendary Oodnadatta Track. A huge white sign confirmed that it was open, the kind of sign you pose in front of before you head out, staring defiantly into the camera lens. But I wasn’t on that kind of trip.
The road lay beautifully graded and empty before me, slim shadows thrown across it. It would be dark soon, and I was on the verge of turning to him to ask whether we shouldn’t head back – camp at Roxby Downs, play it safe. But the only thing in the seat beside me was the greasy chip packet and the map I’d bought in Pimba, the word Outback in clear white letters across the front.
So I checked the level of the water in my bottle, artesian now, and pulled onto the gravel. The surface was harder than bitumen and regular, but I hauled myself up straight anyway, no glory in taking chances. My hands firm on the wheel, I listened for rattles and groaning in the suspension, for large stones pelting the undercarriage. Unfamiliar wheezes. The track was flesh-coloured and banked on each side, punctuated with dips and crests and patches of sand, and I relaxed into it, my body remembering how to read the colours like a rip in the surface of an ocean, calling on other deserts, half-forgotten forms of knowledge.
I took a ridge too fast, landed in corrugation. Remembered the pokie guy’s warning as she fishtailed.
But then we were over the other side and I was whooping, in familiar territory though I’d never been here in my life, my foot sunk into the accelerator, the wheel doing the choreography.
Remembering, with my bones, my gut, every wrenched muscle.
The sun a great red ball on my shoulder as I called him in.
16
Jed rode the waves, the sun a blinding globe, so low in the sky that its position above the horizon meant we saw it and nothing else before us. I could hear him singing, at least I thought I could, above the bellow of the engines, because that was what would happen, out of sheer reckless joy: you’d find yourself cranking out some tune, sometimes making up the words as you went along. The bike was the ultimate form of meditation – no CD player, no distraction, just the sand, the wind, the endless blazing light. And all that purifying space that you filled with your thoughts, your scrappy song, assuming that somehow they aligned as we rose and fell in unison, shadowed the curves of the desert.
After Jed and I’d quit the ferry at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, we’d headed south to Fez, with its medieval market streets impossible to navigate and its carpet shops where young girls squinted at poorly lit looms; then Marrakesh and its pickpockets; Tafraoute, huge boulders, painted blue by the Belgian artist Jean Vérame, littering the plain like an abandoned game of marbles played by gods long fled. Two weeks later we’d reached the Algerian border and the Sahara proper.
And now we were on our way to the giant salt flat near Timimoun, a small oasis town at the base of the Grand Erg Occidental. We’d abandoned the track about twenty minutes back, the sun making it impossible to discern the limits of the terrain or any debris that might shred our tyres or send us careening through the air at a hundred k’s an hour. Side by side, about five metres apart, the only way to gauge the undulations of the dunes was via the flow of the bike, or by watching each other rise and fall, till something like seasickness settled in my gut.
That night we’d sleep on the leeward side of a dune. This was what we’d been told to do in case a sandstorm sprang up and swallowed us whole. After the constant thump of the engines, the silence would weigh on us. Silence us too. Confirming as we crawled aching into our sleeping bags that occupancy of such a place, even for a short time, demanded complicity of the most absolute kind.
But for now, we were masterful.
Fifth gear.
Never dropping below a hundred k’s.
Adrenalin maxing, but with the slow underburn of an orgasm that announces itself way before it’s full-blown.
And all of it was effortless, the sand so smooth and deep the bike responded with a delay. You leant and it was seconds before the tyres carved out the arc you’d demanded of them, like a boat riding a calm but undulant sea – one that didn’t require eyes to be navigated, only bodies attuned.
Of course, there was fear too. But the risk felt calculated. Backed by a bracing, poetic logic.
Jed turned his head sideways to watch me.
He was riding arse off his seat, like a man on a horse, ready for anything the terrain and the animal might throw at him. Behind his visor a grin was forming. His bike rose with mine, floated along the same curve. Dropped an instant earlier, as if an invisible axle between us had been snapped. He hooted. I couldn’t hear it above the thump of the engines, but I knew what it looked like when his face gave in to rapture.
The sand was powerless. The sun too.
We felt born to this.
Unassailable.
And, for a brief time, the world agreed.
17
Three crows startled by my passing quit the ribcage of a kangaroo – bloated almost beyond recognition – the flurry of black wings gothic against the red of the sky.
The road was mostly shadows now. Difficult to read. I’d have to stop soon.
A track led towards a small hill, though it might have only been a place where water travelled. I followed it anyway, to a level spot with an expanse of hard red sand. Turned the car off and got out, the tick of the engine measuring the closing of the silence. I made for the top of the highest dune, past lawn-bowl-sized paddymelons, long strings of them, their green stripes carnivalesque against the red sand. Surveyed the huge sky. A cricket added its treatise on the approaching dark, while, in the distance, dogs howled. Or maybe they were dingoes.
‘You should know these things,’ I said, a crested pigeon launching from a bush, making a sound like a rusty wheel.
And then the flies found me.
I headed back to my car. I wasn’t hungry, those chips from the roadhouse having left a coating of fat on everything, but I scrounged around in the glove box for something to mark the dinner hour and found a warped Mars Bar. Remembered something about a guy who’d once trekked out of the Himalayas with only a Mars Bar for sustenance, his feat almost superseded by product placement, and put it back.
The dogs sent out an exchange of howls, though the moon wasn’t visible yet, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I walked towards the road, the stars astonishingly clear, collected in lactic forms: mythological, domestic, a god’s belt. It was dark enough to need a torch now and I lit up the graded track in both directions – to the north; to the south, where the lights from the uranium mines at Roxby Downs glowed nuclear, a bump on the horizon. Let the space breathe me in, like being at the edge of an ocean that connects you to all oceans, to every other shore.
The dingoes broke through the night again, but this time the howls were coming from three directions. They sounded closer. More intimate.
‘You hear that?’ I asked out loud, my voice small comfort.
I switched the torch off. The moon was smeared by a cloud that acted like a filter, dispersing the light across the ground. I could make out clumps of vegetation, skeleton trees, but nothing moving. Even the wind had followed the day out.
A bug flew into my ear, filled its chamber with a buzzing, the kind of sound that could send a man mad all too quickly in that darkness.
A man besieged by space.
Not far from here was the great dog fence that stretched more than five thousand kilometres from southern Queensland to the Nullarbor, designed to keep the dingoes from heading south to the sheep farms, from stripping a nation of its wealth. Palpably, I was on the wrong side of it.
Another volley of yelps slid across the plain, followed by a testing stillness, and I couldn’t rid myself of an image. A noiseless circling and a dipping of heads. Collecti
ve breath, smelling of rabbit. The moist black of curled lips.
I picked up a fallen branch, but it was so dry it snapped as I whacked it against my palm.
They’re only dingoes, I told myself.
But I felt distance and the size of the sky working their arguments against me. Pack travellers. Baby-stealers.
I returned to the car. Climbed into my sleeping bag. Long minutes collecting between the next exchange of howls, and the next. Though I could no longer tell if they were getting closer, or if it was just the night shrinking around me.
18
Paddymelons lay strung along the sand at the back of my car, the parched carcass of one I’d run over the night before spilling its black seeds like burnt offerings. Somebody tooted as I kicked the melon away, a guy in a white HiLux, the road no longer just a stretch of dirt. When I’d woken, geographies had briefly merged – the white flood plains of the Saharan salt flat, the salt pans east of the Stuart Highway – before the world had taken hold and I’d remembered where I was.
I checked the tyres for thorns, gave them each a kick. Spread the map across the bonnet, while the flies feasted on my skin, so many gathered on one of my shoulders that it looked like armoured plating in my side mirror. With an old biro I’d found in the glove box, I marked an X roughly where I thought this place was.
Our early-morning ritual.
Beside the X, he’d always write the number of the night, keeping tally like notches on a belt – the days beyond civilisation, a trail of crosses for the journey home. And beneath that he’d add any info we might be able to pass on or use on the way back: a waterhole, good shelter from prevailing winds, fucking potholes!!! indicating where he’d punctured a tyre going too fast on a rare strip of what turned out to be not-so-pristine bitumen. Trying to tame that great expanse as it flapped and he pinned it with his hand, his hair straw-like, straightened by the lack of humidity.
I wrote a 4 next to the X, the nib bumping over the grit beneath the paper, a sole thought in my mind.
They would bury him today.
19
The road was empty, the width of a six-lane pool, the car buoyant as a boat in the sand that overlaid the road, the glitter of silica adding to its aquatic feel. At Screech Owl Creek, a pair of magpies flew in front of the windscreen, a squall of black and white. With no time to swerve, I flinched at the thud of bone against the glass. In the rear-vision mirror, one of them lay unmoving, feathers at an unnatural angle, and I thought about stopping, checking for signs of life, but my foot was wedded to its angle over the accelerator. Some kind of raptor was already circling. Hard not to be aware of the waiting game being played out here.
After about an hour, the Olympic Way ended abruptly at a T-intersection with the Oodnadatta Track, made of the same stuff but heading east to west – Marree at one end, Marla at the other. I indicated to turn left. Laughed. I hadn’t sighted a single car since that HiLux. I was still transporting a fly that had joined me for breakfast, a sense of companionship thwarted when it tried to crawl into my mouth. I wound down the window and introduced it to its new territory.
Where the lake should’ve been, a floating landscape split into layers, mirrored by the heat, no reference point except the elasticity of space. Distracted by it, I forgot to read the road and bottomed out again, the suspension giving off a resounding crunch followed by a wheeze, several jets of dust bursting through the floor beneath my feet.
‘Sorry,’ I said, easing up a little.
A sign indicated the old route of the Ghan railway, from before it was redirected further west. And then there it was, shimmering and signposted.
Lake Eyre.
It was one of my father’s favourite explorer stories: Sturt’s search for the mythical inland sea. Its unwavering proof of the folly of men. How, in the winter of 1844, Sturt – British, ex-military, wildly ambitious – had left Adelaide with not only two hundred sheep, six dogs and fifteen men, but a thirty-foot twelve-oar whaler to circumnavigate that great sea, which he would do to the glory of God. My father particularly loved the part about Sturt taking along two sailors, to man the boat, but not a single camel.
Sturt’s estimation of the site of the inland sea was based on a synthesis of his theory about bird flight paths and recent evidence showing the direction in which the inland rivers flowed. But he would be forced to turn back – his team parched and plagued by scurvy – only days away, by his reckoning, from the geographical centre of Australia. To begin the long, inglorious journey home. A misled augur. A thwarted messiah. A man who’d failed to fulfil what the public truly craved: a heroic death, consumed by the Interior.
Though my own curiosity about these stories had been fuelled at first by my father’s fascination, later, after my travels in the Sahara – all those hours reading Théodore Monod, Saint-Exupéry, Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom – my interest was motivated by something else, though what that thing was exactly continued to elude me. The desire to go into the desert was an ancient one, maybe universal, but the Australian stories felt personal, somehow inherent to the place in which I’d been born.
Of the Simpson, Sturt would later write: The stillness of death reigned around us. No living creature was to be heard. Nothing visible inhabited that dreary desert but the ant. But, in truth – my dad loved the irony of this – Sturt had found a sea. It just happened to be an extinct one; a case of right place, wrong time. Only its spectre remained, enshrined in the opal that would draw men with a different desire seventy years later. What’s worse, like the thirst-crazed sailor surrounded by seawater, Sturt was standing above an enormous undrinkable body of water, though in his case it was because he didn’t know it was there. Below his feet was the Great Artesian Basin that runs beneath a quarter of the continent, its series of hidden channels and lakes filled with water so clear, divers claim, it’s like floating in air, so void of light that the only species to survive in it are blind. And, of course, a great body of surface water did lie inland – Lake Eyre, or Kati Thanda as the local Arabana called it – though it only existed in years of abundant rain.
Despite Sturt’s failure and so much evidence to the contrary, the belief in an inland sea persisted well into the twentieth century. A landscape of desire, it held the promise of a quenching that never came. Hydromania was rife – not just in my home state – and plans were drawn to dam or divert rivers and flood the Lake Eyre basin. What nature couldn’t provide, man himself would create. Some believed abundance would spring from the rains that would result from the evaporated waters, a new Eden created. For others it was the will of engineering against an untameable place. But each new proposal proved too costly or ill-conceived, and one by one they were abandoned.
What remained, it seemed, was a dry, empty interior.
An idea from which, like Sturt, we have never quite recovered.
20
The salt looked like snow, the optical illusion so complete that the warm air pushing through my open window felt wrong. The track that led down to Lake Eyre was sandy, though solid enough. The closer I got to the water, the whiter the terrain. I continued until I could no longer be sure if the surface would hold the weight of my car, deep black ruts broken through the crust suggesting that others who’d gone further had struggled to get out.
With the water still at least a hundred metres away, I turned the engine off.
Listened to the wind hefting salt against the paintwork, gentle but persistent.
Tracks fanned out across the basin that separated me from the lake. I chose a virgin stretch, the surface hard, though it soon gave way to mud, the salt crust thin, a kicked chunk sounding like porcelain. I sank. The stuff caked my boots, made them so heavy I decided the only thing for it was to haul myself back to harder ground and remove them, go it barefoot. When I looked back, my boots sat a solitary marker in the flat expanse. The sagging tongues looked thirsty.
The mud squelched and wormed between my toes. Sucked at my heels. Reminded me of the flats at Droughty Po
int, the stink of rotting river creatures, the slimy patches that would make your stomach turn. At the water’s edge, I stood for a moment wondering if it might be caustic, like those lakes in Africa that will burn your skin. Its surface, rippled by the south-easterly, ranged from copper to navy and looked harmless enough. I waded in.
It was as warm as bathwater. Bubbles escaped from the oozy mud and fizzed along my ankles, fine silt billowing like smoke from a pipe. There were other footprints around mine, three or four different pairs, eroded at the edges. Facing north, it was hard to tell where the water ended and the sky began. Planes sometimes crashed out there because they couldn’t tell. To anyone watching, I would be a lone figure against an ambiguous skyline, only the ripples to give it away.
A leaf circumnavigated my ankle, a traveller from a distant waterhole. Why wouldn’t they imagine an inland sea? A great transcontinental river that ran towards the centre in a country where the water flows the wrong way. And before that, there must’ve been Flood Dreaming. Salt Dreaming. Stories that had made this place.
I cupped my hand and tasted the water, so much more saline than the Derwent. Calculated that it must’ve been two years since Jed had passed through here on his way north. I’d been in Ghana at the time and hadn’t found out till I received a letter from him at the poste restante in Accra, the inverted stamps a dead giveaway. He had a thing for snail mail. Liked the physicality of it, the paper that he’d folded and licked travelling to places he hadn’t, a sample of his DNA winging around the planet. That letter was still in a box under my bed in the flat in Glebe. Stashed between other artefacts from that trip: some worn cedi notes, a flake of whitewash from an old Ghanaian slave fort, a monkey’s tooth I’d bought from the fetish market in Ouida. Jed hadn’t explained why he’d decided to work in the Centre, as if a desire to go into the desert would make absolute sense to me. And it had at the time – I’d never questioned it. Only the fact that he’d stayed so long.