by Lia Hills
I headed back to my boots. Tapped them together to dislodge the heavy mud, a shot reverberating across the basin as if somewhere out there was an artillery range. Squatting, I washed my feet in the sand like we’d learnt to in the Sahara, in the absence of water. Like the Tuareg did. Before eating. Before prayer.
The mud caked and fell away.
Reminded me once more that this was the day of his burial.
He must’ve loved it here. A deserted desert lake. Its shining mass. The freedom afforded by distance. Though all that space, the absence of people … sooner or later he would’ve got an idea. Something to do it justice, a stunt or the testing of a myth. Like the time he’d stood, fly half-mast, in front of an electric fence. Fuzz-chinned, he’d egged me on, don’t be a bastard, our faces gormless with the kind of idiocy that comes from thinking collectively. And I’d obeyed, of course – we both had – the imperative of the moment. No thought for descendants or the facts of fried genitalia.
I peeled off my t-shirt. Inhaled the piss smell of not having drunk enough in a place that whips all the moisture out of you. Undid my jeans. Hopped on one leg as the wet hem stuck to my ankle.
Walked out onto a patch of salt that had not a single footprint.
The flies came with me, invaded my back, and I let them, my feet penetrating the crusty surface, pocked with mud the colour of shit. In the Sahara, we’d met pieds-noirs – ‘black feet’ – men who lived with their feet in one continent and their head in another. Forever torn between two worlds. Never sure where and if they belonged.
‘Jed!’ I yelled, his name scorching my throat.
The sound filled the basin. Kicked back. But it wasn’t enough. Not even close.
I cupped my hands. Hunched my shoulders into it. Took a full breath.
‘Jeeeeeed!’
This time it came back to me louder, clearer, my voice altered by the dual response sound has to large spaces: an expansion and a closing in. But it too failed. Was made unreal by repetition. An echo in the desert where usually there was none.
I slumped forwards.
Felt I was going to heave.
Flies congregated around my pubes, their frenzy hazily erotic – a man and his skin alone with the sky.
The wind picked up a remnant of his name, whistled it in my ear. Taunted me with it, caught by the curvature of the basin, set on an eternal loop. And I understood. The dead as an echo of the living, or the living of the dead … except he wasn’t dead, not really, not yet. Not like those who’ve been gone a long time.
Not like ancestors.
This time when I cupped my hands it was to cover my groin, my spine a seething column of black flies. I turned back to look one more time at the lake that so rarely embodies its name, the surface of the water reflecting seamlessly what lay above.
He was no longer here.
It was time for me to go.
As I drove out, I saw a sign prohibiting entry. But like so much that is forbidden, it was already too late.
21
Alone dingo crossed the road on the way in to William Creek, its hindquarters thin and bobbing in the air, so unlike the creatures I’d heard the night before. I drove past an airport full of Cessnas. Pulled up beneath an optimistic row of eucalypts in front of the hotel, its corrugated roof the same olive as the leaves. A many-armed signpost announced that Paris was 14,950 kilometres away. It was just gone one o’clock. My mobile still had no reception. Nothing since Roxby Downs.
A guy came out of the hotel wearing a cowboy hat so broad it threw most of his body into shadow, his staccato walk giving away his age, or at least the kind of life he’d lived. He paused for a moment to light a cigarette. Fingers of smoke rose from his top lip as he caught me watching him.
‘Keeps the flies off.’ He squinted and moved towards my car. ‘A fucking plague when the lake’s in flood.’
‘You live here?’
‘Used to. I was a pilot. Tourist runs to the lake. And before that Flying Doctors.’ He rested his hand on the windscreen, dragged on his rollie fit to turn the thing inside out. ‘You been out there?’
‘To the lake? Yeah.’
‘What did you make of it?’
He didn’t look like the kind of guy who was after a florid description of landscape.
‘It’s got a weird echo,’ I said.
‘Know what you mean. Especially if you’re out there alone. I’m not easily spooked, but this one time …’ He trailed off, a hand going to his forehead as if a migraine loomed. ‘I was raised a churchgoer – every bloody Sunday when we were kids. Polished behind the ears, you know the routine. But I seen things, heard things out there, I tell ya, that I can’t make hide nor hair of.’
He ground the butt into the sand with his boot and the flies took their cue, replacing the loops of smoke that had protected his eyebrows and the entrance to his nostrils.
‘Fucking wrath of God this lot,’ he murmured, waving them away futilely. ‘Think I’d be used to them by now.’
‘Some things you never get used to.’
‘True. A bloke I met up at Oodnadatta – some scientist fella, from Sydney I think he said he was – he told me that there are thirty thousand different types of flies in this bloody country, or thereabouts. What chance have we got?’
‘Fuck all.’
He grinned and hooked his thumb towards the back of the hotel. ‘Man about a dog.’
‘Sure.’
‘Somebody know where you’re heading?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘That’s not wise,’ he said, a fly crawling into his ear. ‘Know how it is, though. Do most of my travelling alone. That way I get to pick the topic of conversation.’
I laughed and he looked pleased. Probably didn’t get to exercise his words often. Tapping the roof of my car, he hooked his thumb once more towards the back of the hotel, where there were a couple of tired-looking motel rooms. Sauntered off, his dust shifted north by the wind.
Once he was gone, I crossed the road to the toilets. Listened to the creak of the corrugated roof as I enjoyed sitting on something that didn’t move.
The light was shocking when I stepped back outside, as if it were something new. Opposite was a low-lying building made of pale stone. I headed over to it, up the stairs into the enclosed world of its air-conditioning. The walls were covered in photos, a thousand sunrises and sunsets, the colours hyperbolic. Prodigious flocks of birds cast their shadows, everything taken from their perspective. The woman behind the counter kept an eye on me as she explained the cost of a sunset flight to a pastel-clad couple with American accents who looked sorely removed from their natural habitat.
Restless, I fingered the postcards for a bit. Moved over to a table by the window with a pile of glossy books. One called The Desert Sea had a picture on the front cover of the lake in flood. Inside was a map of the basin and the creeks and rivers that ran into it. The Warburton. The Finke. The Cooper. Others I’d never heard of. And there were sections on the history of the area, the peoples that visited it: the Arabana, Wanganuru, Dieri, among others. The explorers and early settlers. A cattle station the size of Israel.
I lingered over a picture of glass australites that looked like dumbbells. According to the caption they were asteroid fragments, shaped as they fell from the sky. Considered healing objects by the local Aboriginal people. I thought about the echo in the basin and the guy with the cowboy hat. What it was that might have spooked him.
A few pages over, I stalled on another black-and-white photo.
It was of a pitted white object that reminded me of a ball I’d found washed up at Droughty Point when I was a kid, so bleached and crevassed by the river and the sun that it looked like a brain. The thing had fascinated me – the way the elements had clouded its origin, made something so ordinary somehow mystic. So I’d pocketed it, taken it home. Put it in the drawer where I kept other gifts the river had spewed up. An old bullet casing. The rutted tooth of a whale. Evidence that we were somehow in l
eague.
I took another look at the cracked half-sphere in the photo, unsure what it could be. Ran a finger across the page – mud from the lake still trapped beneath my nail – to the description of gypsum crystals scattered across dunes like broken glass. Its burning and crumbling. The process of adding layer upon layer of the white paste to the head. And above that, the caption.
An Aboriginal mourning cap.
22
I quit the Oodnadatta Track. Headed west in the direction of Coober Pedy. The road was not so well-kept here, the corrugation annoying even my teeth. I had to hold the steering wheel so stiff that pins and needles formed in my arms, my body entering that rhythm when one becomes an extension of the other – skeleton and chassis – every rattle a morse code.
Rounding a bend, a rock hit the axle with a thwack. I winced, shifted sideways in my seat, a wrecked van on the side of the road with the words Don’t drive too fast spray-painted along its side in fluoro green. Hindsight, a beautiful thing. At the bottom of a ditch, I aimed the wheels at the ridge that ran up the centre of the lane, avoiding its steepest point. Rode it the way I’d learnt to from these German guys we’d met on the road that led to the hermitage at Assekrem, in southern Algeria. We’d seen their dust before they’d come into view, their rusty Lada a picture of make-do ingenuity. Over tins of herrings and pickles they’d brought with them all the way from Nurnberg, they’d explained techniques core to surviving in the desert on four wheels. Insisted I give it a go. Jed had opted to take a siesta instead, having been kept awake the night before by a dodgy stomach. When we’d returned after a gruelling half-hour of sand-bashing, we’d found him lying in the shade of an acacia, so sound asleep the flies roamed unhindered, his arms crossed upon his chest.
I once imagined Jed’s death, like a magic spell, a warding off.
Contorted metal.
Grey matter like overcooked pasta.
A dark limp tongue.
The details are important. They’re the greatest talisman. No event ever occurs twice.
Another thwack, this time against the chassis, dust pluming through a hole near my ankle like a geyser reduced to its mineral content.
By now, they’d all be at the church. The people with the violated stares wedged beside the ones who were trying to look cheerful, celebrating a life, Life; an ex-girlfriend or two; old mates, the ones who’d never left the island; our mothers side by side, robed in black. His brother would have chosen the songs. Probably went through Jed’s old CD collection, the one stashed in boxes in his mother’s spare room. That Khaled album he’d bought in Tamanrasset because, even though we were sick of hearing it in every café, he said raï was the only music that embodied the soul of the desert. MC Solar. All the dubstep he accumulated when he was staying in that shit box in South London. Skream. Burial’s ‘Gutted’ – God, he was obsessed with that: two guys from different tribes, ancient ones, both close to extinction.
For the first time since I’d left Sydney, the track narrowed to a single lane. Avenues of green stretched on either side. Lawn-like. Memorial.
They’d bury him in their own way.
In the end, neither Jed nor I would have a say in it.
Ahead lay Coober Pedy, a place where the people had gone underground. Where everything of worth had been dug for. Excavated. I owed it to Jed to understand what had happened to him. Do justice to the kind of life we’d led. A neat funeral wouldn’t have cut it. Not even close.
In the rear vision, the road was golden and straight and even, its length making sense of the sky, of the vast black cloud that was set to engulf it. I pulled over and got out. Stared at it, this gleaming snake – where I’d been, where it was going. The route that Jed had once taken.
Climbed the verge, the sun sitting on my shoulder, and pissed in a dried-up floodway.
One more act of solidarity.
23
Doors carved into the side of dirt walls, a troglodyte world, a network of driveways and meandering trails. There were piles everywhere, great white mounds, heaped rubble, puce yellow orange, like erupting skin. Machinery corroded in the shade, anything to do with extraction, the trucks of mixed vintage, not a tree in sight, not one worth its name. No people either, just the things they used, the places they’d laid claim to. A dog ambled over a rise, gold against the white, its ears alert to the deepening sky.
The track ran out, collided with the highway. Pale tyre marks curved across the black, mostly heading north. Coober Pedy 5, said the sign.
I leant into the sweet hum of bitumen, shredded bits of tyre strewn along the edges, everywhere makeshift, like something was about to be discovered and everyone would have to move to wherever it was. The billboards bred: Underground B&B, Oasis Caravan Park, Best pizza in town. As I slowed to turn off the highway, a road train pelted up my arse.
Town was past an oval with a respectable veneer of grass, a tourist office sporting an almighty antenna, a lone car parked out front. Residential streets stretched out behind it, the houses repetitive and above ground. Then the town proper began, fancy hotels and a main street lined with shops. One word dominated like a stutter – a raison d’être if ever a town had one – even in Greek, Opalios painted above a large display window full of rocks, the walls a jigsaw of gaudy colours.
I pulled up out front. In the shade to the side of the shop, two Aboriginal women were sitting on the concrete, both barefoot, one wearing a heavy plaid jacket despite the late-afternoon sun. A puppy with a white tip to its tail nudged one of the women’s toes, was ignored. Further down the hill there was a supermarket, four-wheel drives lined up in the wide parking bays, some with rooftop tents, others CB aerials. A backpackers’ van had Honk if you’re not wearing undies painted on the back, the only moving traffic a faded Patrol crawling past the petrol station. A crow protested at its passage from a lamppost.
I drained the last of the water from the bottle I’d filled up in William Creek, but I had a different kind of thirst. I’d noticed a pub on my way in, near the roundabout, but it had looked about as inviting as a sauna in a heatwave. I looked both ways for an alternative. There didn’t seem to be one, so I locked my car and headed for the closest opal shop.
As the flyscreen slammed behind me, a woman got up from a stool behind the counter and stretched her long fingers across the glass, her hair piled on her head and the yellow of sulphur.
‘Good evening,’ she said, her eyes squinting as if emerging from a cave.
‘Hi.’ I nodded, instantly regretting my informality, the woman about my mother’s age.
I glanced at the opals beneath the glass. Some were set in silver, some in gold, others raw or polished but free of metal. All were well-lit to show their colours amid the milkiness. The woman eyed my fingers, their bareness, before reaching for a tray. It contained large rings inset with triangles of blue opal.
‘Titanium,’ she said.
‘Yeah, nice, but I was wondering where’s a good place to get a drink and a meal round here?’
She lowered her head and put the tray back under the counter.
‘Where you come from?’
‘I camped south of the lake last night. Came via William Creek.’
‘No. Where you born?’
‘Tasmania. Hobart. And you?’
‘Thessaloniki,’ she said, the h swallowed up.
‘I went there once. While ago now.’
She pointed out the window. ‘The Italian miners’ club,’ she told me. ‘Up that hill.’
I glanced in the direction she was indicating. The club sat high on a ridge above the other rooftops, large black letters across its front.
‘Though maybe no food tonight,’ she added. She gestured to the clock on the wall behind her, gold hands stretching across a Cycladic backdrop.
‘Red eggs,’ I said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Thessaloniki – that’s what I remember about it. The red eggs in the centre of the bread.’
‘For Easter.’ She smiled.
>
From beneath a stand hung with cheap metal key rings, she took a small basket. Inside were polished stones: cat’s eye, amethyst, turquoise, onyx. She held it up to me.
‘Choose one,’ she urged, her eyes not leaving my face.
When I hesitated, she rattled it. Held it closer.
‘We offer one to all our customers,’ she said, the last word pronounced simply, divesting it of all pressure of exchange.
My finger circled the black onyx. Settled instead on a red stone, veins of a darker matter crisscrossing it, giving it the appearance of flesh.
I held it out to her on my flattened palm.
Remembered an old lady who’d rented me a room in the Peloponnesus, the walls reinforced with saints and icons, a picture of a Jesus with a glowing heart lit up all night above my bed as if a single organ could be the source of deliverance. The following morning, the woman had done a reading of her granddaughter’s coffee cup, and I recalled it now as if it had been only days ago, not years. The dirt smell of the grains. The Greek words, how they’d sounded like an incantation. The wave of relief that had dispersed across the girl’s body.
‘What kind is it?’ I asked.
‘Blood jasper.’
‘Blood?’
‘From the Great Sandy Desert,’ she said.
I closed my fist around the stone.
24
Back on the street, I almost lost my bearings in the warren of tracks that wound between underground churches and backpacker hostels and dugout homes. But by keeping the top of Boot Hill at the right height above me, eventually I found the place, a rusty sign marked Italo-Australian Miners Club out front. I parked in the huge dirt car park beside a red Pajero with a dint the size of a large animal in the passenger door. Four other vehicles also huddled in front of the entrance. The club was flat-roofed, the same as most of the other buildings, and made of besser blocks. A red skirt of dust circled its foundations.