by Lia Hills
Inside was dark and expansive, the carpet comfortingly sticky. Behind a huge bar to the left sat a small woman wearing a purple jumper, a phone pressed to her ear. She was riffling through a pile of papers with her spare hand. As I approached, I saw that they were for footy tipping. She held up a finger to silence me. Apart from her, the place was empty, a giant disco ball hanging motionless from the ceiling. While I waited for her to finish her call, I looked around for the owners of the parked cars, saw a man’s back pressed against a window on the far side of the room, a boot heel resting against the glass. Beyond him, there seemed to be others.
‘What do you want?’ asked the woman, putting down the phone, her accent thick with both the place she came from and the one she’d adopted, each vying for ascendancy.
‘A pint of Coopers, thanks.’
She angled the glass, the cloudy liquid clearing from the bottom up as she reached over and placed it on the bar. There was something menacing about her despite her size, dismissive, as if she might as easily tell you to fuck off as serve you. As if she was made for higher things.
‘Six-fifty,’ she said, as if the sum was barely worth her spit.
She dropped the coins in the till and returned to the papers, an old blue Bic clutched in her hand.
I downed a third of the pint before carrying my drink outside.
Men looked up from their drinks as I went out, seven or eight of them. Readjusted their elbows against the freestanding bar around which some stood, others sat on stools. A couple nodded. I nodded back and checked out the view. It took in most of the main street and the northern part of town, its excavations more crude when viewed from up here, the sky sedimentary with less than an hour of sunlight left. I moved to a patch of grass by the fence, the hill falling away from it, white plastic chairs facing each other in conversation. Turned my phone on, the battery dangerously low. Three voice messages came through and a number of texts, mostly from my mother, one from my sister that said, Call me!
I sculled another third of my beer before dialling her number.
‘Saul!’
‘Kelly.’
‘Mum’s been trying to call you all day. Where the hell are you?’
‘Coober Pedy.’
‘What the fuck, Saul? I don’t get it. Well, at least you’ve still got a few days,’ she said as a bird large enough to be an eagle flew across the sun, its silhouette as black as the night that was on its way.
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s been a coronial inquiry, so they’ve delayed the funeral. It won’t be till Friday. Plenty of time to get your arse down here.’
‘I can’t. It’s not easy for me to explain, but it’s important … I’m sorry.’
She took a deep breath and I braced myself.
‘Whatever it is you’re up to, Saul, just remember, he …’
‘Kelly?’
But my phone had died, the battery finally flat.
‘Shit.’
I shoved it in my pocket. Emptied my glass. Went back in for another then returned to the grass and the gang of plastic chairs. Made like I was appreciating the view. Stood there like a sad bastard while down in Tassie my sister was probably thinking I’d hung up on her.
One of the guys came towards me, a goatee elongating his already pointed chin. He lowered the awning on the ridge side, blocked the angling sun.
‘You just arrived?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. From the lake.’
‘Sticking around long?’
‘Nah.’
He turned away.
‘Long road,’ I added quickly. ‘Was dying for a drink.’
‘Know the feeling.’
He moved back towards the other men, but tilted his head, the invitation so subtle I almost missed it.
I followed him. More nods as I sat on one of the high stools.
‘Where you from?’
‘Tasmania.’
‘No shit. Knew a guy who nearly got himself killed down there. Somewhere out past that mining town. Savage lot, he reckoned.’
‘Queenstown?’
‘Probably. Dead now.’
‘Who’s that? asked a guy who was missing a finger.
‘Old Tulla.’
They all nodded as if some agreement had been made long ago about the nature of his fate.
‘We don’t get many tourists in here.’
I felt the gauntlet thrown. Concentrated on the way each mouthful of beer wore away at the residue of the road.
‘Well, I’ll be careful not to ask for directions then,’ I said finally.
The man who’d spoken scrutinised the froth as it slid down my empty glass, but there was a loosening all round, the sun haemorrhaging from gold to red.
‘You’ll be needing another,’ he said.
I recognised the cue. Returned from the bar this time with a jug and a packet of chips. They offered me names as I filled glasses – Tommy, Clem, Jack, Marco, the guy without the finger dubbed Captain Nemo.
Clem nodded at Tommy, who pushed away from the window and went inside, a woman coming out through the door that Tommy held open for her, a slight bow in his step.
The woman pushed back the shock of blonde hair that had fallen over one eye and took in the scene. She looked the kind of strong that came from something refusing to be contained, a beauty to it, as if she was daring you to drop your guard. And there was no doubt the other men sensed it too, Jack shuffling in his seat, his beer glued to his lip as he tried to look the other way.
‘Evening, everybody,’ she said, her accent unmistakably German.
‘Evening,’ the men chorused, like an outback version of Greek theatre.
‘Cheers.’
There was a raising of glasses.
The woman took a seat up the other end of the bar beside Clem, whispered something in his ear, her hand on his arm. But he shook his head.
Tommy returned with another jug of beer and filled my glass, which seemed to have a hole in it.
‘Been a hell of a day,’ he said.
‘Tell me about it.’
For a moment I thought he’d taken it as an instruction, his mouth shaping itself around a thought, but he returned to his place by the window, his boot once more propped against the glass like a lazy stork. The woman passed Clem a small package. I looked away, none of my business. But when she picked up her beer and moved towards the fence overlooking Coober, I followed her, not deaf to the commentary marking each step.
‘Great view,’ I said before I could retract it.
‘No camera?’
A smile flickered across her face as she took another sip, and I noticed the splintering of the sun through the beer, her throat smooth and whiter than the rest of her, calling out to be touched. I tried to focus instead on a lone dog circumnavigating a bin on the main street, its black tail a cutlass.
‘You live here?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you’re from Germany?’
‘Near Stuttgart,’ she clarified. ‘Not a miner, then?’
‘Nor Italian.’
She smiled but kept her eyes on the horizon.
‘That bastard bothering you?’ shouted one of the guys.
‘He’s all right, Marco.’
‘Just as well.’
‘Precious commodity,’ she said quietly.
‘What?’
‘Women, round here.’
She slid into one of the plastic seats. I pulled one up beside her. A wagtail perched on the fence watched me, its feathers evidence of a breeze. Its tail flicked back and forth as if gauging its source.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.
‘Ziggy.’
‘Why here?’
‘Family connection.’
‘Right.’
The sun dipped below the hill opposite, shot its last tangents into the sky as the door to the bar slammed. Two more guys came out, both of them sun-charred and wearing khaki t-shirts. Neons flickered on in the overhang.
‘And you? Why are you here?’ she asked, suspicion making brief passage across her mouth.
‘Sort of a wake. Except …’
‘Awake?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
A dog barked unseen in a street below. Behind us, somebody told somebody else to fuck off.
‘I’m heading to Alice,’ I said, my knee suddenly acquiring a jig.
‘Alice?’
‘To find a friend of a friend.’
Ziggy cupped the base of her glass in her hand. Twisted it a half-circle as if aligning it with some imagined grid.
‘You remind me of someone,’ I said.
She tilted her head like I’d just uttered the worst pick-up line in the world.
‘No, seriously. Though I can’t remember who. Not a woman.’
My head swayed, the alcohol beginning to take its toll, though still clear enough for an epiphany – that I was making a cock-up of things.
‘Sorry,’ I said, conscious of the dried mud still under my fingernails. ‘It’s been a strange day.’
‘Plenty of those around here.’
She dug around in the front pocket of her jeans. Extracted a small dusty rock. Licking her finger, she wiped its surface revealing a smeared layer of white that, though still coarse, picked up the light from the neons and broke it into shards.
‘Opalised cockle shell,’ she said, balancing it on her palm.
‘Nice.’
She tossed it to me and I almost let it fall, my judgement off.
‘You look like you need something,’ she said.
I held the rock between my thumb and forefinger. Some of the stones I’d seen in that shop had had hefty price tags and they’d been smaller than this one.
‘You sure?’ I asked.
She grinned. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t ask for your firstborn in exchange. You don’t know much about opal, do you?’
‘Nah.’
‘Most of it was formed when the inland sea dried up. Silica collected in every little fault. Creatures that got buried in the silt sometimes got opalised too. Some small,’ she said, nodding at the shell, ‘some huge, like the plesiosaur they have in the museum down in Adelaide.’
‘Trapped water,’ I said, closing my palm around the shell.
Ziggy watched me over the top of her glass as she took another swig, her eyes the kind that stripped you bare, the green irises shot with navy.
‘I suppose you could call it that,’ she said.
‘What’s goin’ on?’ asked a voice, territorial.
One of the guys in a khaki t-shirt had moved to stand beside Ziggy. His thigh was almost touching her shoulder, the denim streaked with dust. Behind him was his mate, stubble holding his jaw together. He seemed just as happy to see me.
Ziggy pulled her shoulders back. ‘Dylan. Not seen you for a while.’
‘Who’s this?’
‘This is …’
‘Saul,’ I finished for her.
‘Where you from, Saul?’
‘Tasmania.’
And you could see it – the machinations in the small brain – something about incest or having two heads. A cliché just hankering to find its mark. And I could’ve left it, but the long day and three pints on an empty stomach were applying their own logic.
‘You’d fit in real well down there,’ I said, pocketing the shell.
‘Prick.’
Dylan’s mate took a step forwards, his hand forming a fist by his side. Both of them were bigger than me and well-acquainted with large machinery by the look of them, sleeves strategically rolled to reveal pumped biceps and what looked like matching tattoos.
I stood. Felt a wind behind me. The absence of my usual backup.
‘We were just leaving,’ said Ziggy, her hand at my elbow.
‘Better if you stay out of it,’ said Dylan.
His feet shuffled that bluff of a dance I knew so well, the fallout of growing up as I did in a place where violence was considered more a way of articulating than a symptom of anything. His nostrils twitched, sniffing out my next move, solar plexus the only thought I could hold. That, and how quickly his mate would be on me even if I threw a good punch. Two on one. I’d known worse odds.
Then Clem was standing beside us, glass held out in front of him like it was his anchor point.
‘Too early for a fight, wouldn’t you say, fellas?’
Ziggy shoved her half-empty glass into Dylan’s hand. His eyes flicked between it and the back of her head as I followed her out, a low growl in Clem’s voice as he told Dylan to leave it like he was instructing a nervy dog.
The woman was still ensconced behind her bar, a queen in exile. Barely looked up as we exited.
Outside, the cars sat dormant, their windscreens blazed yellow by the light above the entrance, the sky indigo, more like a sea than anything constructed of air. Ziggy unlocked the door of an old ute, the white paint long given up its hegemony.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
She pushed her fringe back so she could take a good look at me and smiled. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said. ‘Dylan’s okay, but he likes the taste of his own blood too much.’
‘Know the type.’
‘Where are you staying?’
‘Nowhere. Here. In the back of my car.’
She glanced at the door of the miners’ club. The rattle of an unseen vehicle negotiating potholes competed with the last of the birds.
‘You okay to drive?’
‘Sure,’ I lied, the beer and the expansiveness of the sky rendering me capable of anything.
‘Follow me,’ she said, swinging herself into the cabin of the ute.
Anything but being alone.
25
Ziggy’s high beams picked out circles in the darkness. Flattened everything to a uniform white. Dwellings emerged suddenly, iron sheeting, rough windows set into rock, then were gone as she bounced over the uneven road. And each time I caught the world illuminated twice, in her lights then mine, my beer-fuelled brain morphing her brake lights into supernovas. We continued until I knew I’d have no chance of finding my way back; there was not a single street sign, only occasional numbers, the sequence of which had escaped me a few k’s back.
Ziggy slowed into a bend, one of her brake lights winking. Obeyed the contours of a narrow track, deftly avoiding a rut that grabbed hold of my left front wheel and yanked me sideways, fair punishment for trailing so close. The tyre slipped as I revved, but finally gained traction. Shot me forwards and almost over the edge.
‘Shit!’
I reined it in. Took the rest of it cautiously, Ziggy the only lit thing in that black landscape. Finally she turned into a curved driveway, the parking area at the end empty, though big enough to hold ten vehicles. I pulled up beside her. Getting out, I managed to tangle my arm in the seatbelt.
‘Mina’s,’ Ziggy said, slamming the cabin door.
Dust fell at her feet, and for a brief drunken moment that felt the appropriate thing to do, a floodlight suspended from a rope turning her skin golden. But I got a hold of myself. Followed her to a porch jutting out beyond the hill, the rest of the house dug out of the rock. Cacti huddled in clumps on either side of a weathered door, lit by one of those oval lights in a metal cage they have on submarines. A thick rope coiled in the corner added to the nautical theme, like some kind of longing.
‘Who’s Mina?’ I asked.
‘A friend of mine,’ she said, unlocking the front door.
We went inside, into a kitchen with a small wooden table in the centre, an ozone smell all around, the only windows the ones that faced the porch, both of them closed. No Mina in sight. A collection of ceramic jugs on a shelf edged with plastic lace hinted at her age.
‘Isn’t she home?’ I asked, remembering that ours were the only two cars parked outside.
‘She is, but Mina goes to bed early. Gets up with the sun.’
Ziggy dropped the keys into a bronze ashtray on the bench. Took two bottles of pills from a shelf above the sink
and filled a glass with water.
‘Back in a minute,’ she said.
She disappeared down steps which went deeper into the rock, the walls covered with uneven shallow grooves. Not the work of a machine. A fine white powder coated my fingers when I touched the wall beside the sink. I wiped it on my jeans.
‘She dug it out herself,’ said Ziggy, coming back into the kitchen. ‘With a little help from her husband.’
Her voice sank on the last word. She went to the fridge and took out a plate of cheeses and a large salami almost as thick as her arm. Put it on the table beside an unlabelled bottle filled with what I took at first to be water, till she poured some into two shot glasses.
‘A wake,’ she said. ‘That’s what you were saying before? Sometimes I miss things, not my first language. Prost.’
I raised my glass, doubting she missed much.
The grappa was lethal. The kind of homemade rocket fuel that had got me in trouble on a small island off the Croatian coast, a night that had nearly seen me hitched to a sheep farmer’s daughter.
Ziggy threw hers back. Cut slices from a dark round loaf, the knife passing close to her fingers. She gestured to the plate and I helped myself, hungry enough to eat road kill. Downed the grappa, the alcohol adding a swimming quality to my exhaustion, an edge to the beer.
‘A wake?’ she said, watching me scull. ‘Isn’t that what the Irish do when someone dies?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you Irish?’
‘No, but …’
She waited, her nail tapping the glass of the bottle. Frowning, she poured us both another.
‘When I was eight,’ she said, ‘I had the same dream every night for many weeks.’
I lowered my mouth to the glass and sipped, a faint smell of citrus. Wondered if I’d missed a segue.
‘It was about a place where there was a lot of desert,’ said Ziggy, dipping her finger into the clear liquid. ‘Where I grew up there were trees everywhere. We lived in the Black Forest, in Calmbach, a small spa town near the Wildsee. In my dream, rivers ran under the desert, and when you walked on that land you could feel their presence, like the heartbeat beneath a person’s skin.’
‘A pulse?’