The Crying Place

by Lia Hills

  Bush etiquette obliged that I stop, but there was something in the way the driver lowered his head that I took as dismissive. I hugged the opposite side of the track, polite with my dust. Thought I saw him look up as I drove past. A couple of car-lengths further and I was already regretting not having pulled over, but it was too late to go back.

  ‘Dickhead,’ I said, thumping the steering wheel with the heel of my hand.

  Distracted, I didn’t notice a ridge, the chassis connecting with a deep thwack that penetrated even the upholstery. Dust pumped through the floor. I blamed the trees. The black lines they threw across the track. Their conviction – that they looked permanent despite all signs of precariousness. Of course, I knew it was just shame fusing with road fatigue. That all I needed was a good drink of water and a breather.

  But the old compulsion was back.

  Gotta keep moving, moving.

  I inhaled deeply, having forgotten to do so for a while, the shadows deceptive, making the surface increasingly hard to read. The car shimmied. And again. Fishtailed. Slammed into a rut. Something was wrong with my rhythm. I needed to reset things or I could end up with a flat. Or, worse still, flip into a roll. So easy to do if you miscalculated. If your body fell out of sync with the road.

  Ahead, a grey mass was slumped across the bank of the road.

  I geared down. Leant judiciously on the brake. Pulled over, the dust a creature reabsorbed. Just a couple of minutes to regroup, I promised myself. Then I’d get going again.

  As I got out my hand shot to my nose and I gagged.

  The thing was a camel, its stomach bloated, eyes long since become food. Glittering columns dripped off its skin that was now in strips, the flies surging and infinite. Around the neck, it looked as if the camel had once worn a collar – had a human function – but it was the work of the sun, the fur consumed, skin black as tar.

  Its lips retracted.

  The wrench of returning.

  The morning I’d left Alice, Alec had told me a story about an old mahout’s saddle, left over from the cameleer days. How it had been found buried beneath rusting machinery a few years back in a cattle shed outside Alice, its buffel-grass stuffing breaching its seams. The owner of the shed had disappeared for a week, only to return with an academic from Adelaide in tow. Had taken to offering dates and sludgy Turkish coffee to whoever turned up at his place.

  I flicked away a maggot that had dropped near my boot, the writhing whiteness of it. Thought about how a man’s history could suddenly be rerouted. Stood there while the stink of this dead thing laved over me, forced its way into my nose, my mouth, my eyes.

  Like the roo I’d seen near Erldunda, its front legs were crossed, its final posture also one of supplication.

  49

  The turnoff was nothing much. Another government signpost. The road the same ochre as the one I was on, though much narrower. I edged my way over the sand ridge, the car pitching like a kayak in rapids. Stared down the track. It went straight for a while, heavily rutted, then disappeared around a corner, the camber obscured by scrub.

  This was it.

  The way I had to go.

  I tried to read in it the qualities of an answer, but as always it was contingencies that took hold, the wheel tearing at my arms. I let go of the steering for a bit. Trusted the contours to guide it. Received a whack across my knuckles for doing so. One of the spokes collected my thumb as I tried to take control again. Wrenched it back at a weird angle.

  ‘That’ll teach you,’ I said.

  A desert oak scraped across the windscreen, leaving debris in wipers that hadn’t known water since Adelaide. Rain would render a track like this unviable within hours, floodways evident from the downpour a few weeks back, meandering across the sand like swathes of hair across a woman’s back. But there was not a cloud, not even the suggestion that such a thing existed, the sky a solid roof of blue.

  The road opened up, allowing me to make good headway. It crossed a plain dominated by spinifex and buffel grass, before dipping down into another waterway, a stretch of sand giving me some grief before my tyres gained traction again, spat me back out. The terrain on the other side was mostly desert oak and mulga, a few other species wrangling for their place. Ahead were ranges, their edges smoothed by distance. According to the map Alec had copied for me, sparse on detail once you quit the road, Ininyingi lay somewhere near there.

  The track curved around shrub, sometimes hit a straight before detouring again. As I rounded a bend, the engine made a snapping sound. Grass clipping the chassis, we rolled to a stop.

  ‘Shit.’

  Leaning into the wheel, I tried to start her again, but there was nothing doing. At least the starter motor sounded okay. I popped the bonnet. Everything looked normal; no loose cables, no fugitive steam, nothing leaking underneath. I ran my hand above the radiator, but it was no hotter than it should’ve been after dealing with sand. It had to be the timing belt. In which case, I wasn’t going anywhere.

  I lowered the bonnet and took a look around. I’d done about five k’s since the turnoff. Walking back to the road was an option, but no truck was going to haul itself along this track if it didn’t have to. A road train wouldn’t even fit. Better to sit tight and wait. See who came along. The track looked like it got a bit of use. Eventually somebody would turn up.

  In the back was the box of food. I grabbed an apple and leant against the passenger door, the only part of my car in the shade, and listened to the ticking of the engine as it cooled. Tried not to hear it as a betrayal. I checked my phone. No reception. Wouldn’t be till I returned to Yulara, from what I’d been told.

  ‘So. What now, kiddo?’

  There was an off beat sound, like a hinge in need of WD-40. It was accompanied by a rustling in a tree behind me.

  I spun around, but there was nothing there, not of the size or substance to produce a noise like that. It repeated itself, the movement localised to a spray of thin-leafed foliage. A branch wavered, too light for even such a hollow-boned creature.

  ‘Western bowerbird,’ I said, its colouring the same as the one I’d seen in Alec’s garden. Yellow-brown. A collection of spots on its back.

  It screeched again and shifted perch, its throat expanding to the metallic sounds. Cocked its head and fixed a shiny eye on me.

  And then it spoke – at least the noises it made resembled words.

  Push push, it said.

  I laughed. ‘You gotta be kidding me.’

  Push push, it insisted, then embarked on a full-blown imitation of a car revving. Others had come before me.

  ‘Too far,’ I replied. ‘Besides, it would take more than one man.’ And a bird, I was about to add when it moved closer, tapped the trunk with its beak. What would a bird know about human survival?

  This time it did a good rendition of a crow, as if trying to throw me off – three caws breaking into a wail – another contender for the loneliest sound on the planet. The desert oak weighed in, the wind sieved through its spindly foliage articulated as with with, through the mulga as will will, until all I needed were my ears to know from which direction it came.

  ‘I thought you were trying to be helpful,’ I said and tossed the bowerbird a piece of my apple.

  It opened its beak and released a sound I didn’t recognise, maybe its own: the price of simulation. The apple it ignored. If it ate flies then life was bountiful. Pivoting its head, it began revving again.

  ‘Quit that,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to think.’

  A yellow butterfly flitted past, altogether too fragile. I squinted as it circumnavigated the branch on which the bird was sitting, though it was soon hoisted free by the warm air, flowers out there somewhere. The bowerbird went through its repertoire – a budgie, a magpie lark, something like a cat; had it all covered, predator and prey – while I wrenched open the back door, the one with a huge dent in the bottom. Checked the water in the jerry can.

  At least two-thirds full, fifteen litres or so.
/>   Enough.

  I contemplated that word for a moment. Felt the thirst of those faced with a limited supply, my tongue already raspy. Moved out of the domain of the sun.

  I looked back along the track. There was enough distance from the last bend for someone to see my car before they hit it, as long as they weren’t going too fast, as long as they had their mind on the road. I thought about hanging my spare t-shirt in a tree before the corner, but the sight of it might work more as a distraction. The calculations were already beginning, and I couldn’t help feeling the pleasure of it – the faint nausea – that every choice counted.

  A fly edged around a scab on my wrist. I flicked it away. Filled my bottle from the jerry can and took a huge swig, blocking my throat so the water engulfed my mouth before I swallowed. The wind rose, rerouted by the door frame, and the perimeters of my mouth shrank once more. In other places they gave names to them, the desert winds – Harmattan, Sirocco, the Spanish Descuernacabras, the ‘wind that de-horns goats’ – and maybe they did here too, only I didn’t know them.

  With with, murmured the desert oak.

  Will will, mocked the mulga.

  I chucked the apple core into the bush. The bowerbird flew off in search of others to advise. A tiny mosquito, the colour of coastal sand, evaded my grasp. Ininyingi was at least twenty k’s away according to the map, a good half-day’s walk.

  I checked my watch. Just gone 2:30.

  Studied the sand at my feet.

  There were more tyre tracks than just my own.

  At the campground, I’d heard a guy with a heavily-equipped LandCruiser talking about Lasseter. The guy had just arrived from Western Australia, taken the same road as me but in the opposite direction. On the way through, he’d stopped in a place called Tjunti, at the infamous cave on the Hull River where Lasseter had holed up all those years ago to wait for help to arrive. Of course, it hadn’t. At least, not the type Lasseter had been hoping for, the river nothing but a dry bed. In his journal, Lasseter had explained that the exact location of the reef he’d found was marked on the map he’d buried along with his kit bag on the eastern side of the sand hill where his camels had bolted – if there wasn’t an inland sea, there must be gold. But by the time the map was dug up seventeen years later, it looked more like dusty tea-leaves than the answer to one of the desert’s greatest mysteries. The local Pitjantjatjara people had brought Lasseter food, tried to coax him to return. It pained them to see a man dying alone. But Lasseter, hallucinatory with thirst and plagued with trachoma, had shot at them with his rifle. He’d died not long after, attempting to walk back to Kata Tjuta.

  Standing there, the wind withing its way through the desert oak, I envied him his cave.

  A memory taking hold.

  Carried on the wind.

  50

  La grippe du desert, they called it. Desert flu. A couple of people had already died. Succumbed to an overburdened health system and the scarcity of even the most basic medication. With me, it began one morning when I woke with a raging headache, the roof of the zeriba we were sleeping in suddenly alive with the seething mass of insects that inhabited its palm fronds, my vision narrowing, my hearing telescopic.

  ‘You all right, mate?’ Jed asked, crawling out of his sleeping bag.

  ‘Not great,’ I managed as the beetles’ traffic through the dry fronds took on the sound of nails scratching at steel.

  He whipped out the thermometer we’d brought with us, a good quality German one just in case. Threaded it between my teeth. Drew it out again after what seemed like an age, his face collapsing in a frown.

  ‘We need to get you to the hospital,’ he said.

  He peeled off my sleeping bag, fastened my helmet on me and hauled me out into the sun. Lifted me somehow onto the back of his bike, which I almost toppled, the world a spinning, churning thing. The half-tame camel that often wandered the campsite chewed at the door to the zeriba, its fat lips pulled into a jeer. Was shooed by the young Tuareg guardian, his head wrapped in a deep blue cheche, the ten-metre strip of cloth wound against the wind and sand, the skin of his dark hands so dry they were creased with white.

  It took everything I had to stay on the bike, the ground passing beneath us like water, rutted and golden and wheezing with dry spume. At the hospital, Jed dragged me through the front door. A nurse took one look at me propped against the wall, Jed pinning me in place, and clucked.

  ‘Venez, monsieur,’ she coaxed, and gestured for Jed to help me down the corridor.

  She found me a bed in a private room – probably didn’t want to lose a Westerner on her shift – blood on the sheets, no water in the tap, no tea for us when the trolley came round because we hadn’t brought a cup.

  Within half an hour they’d got a drip into me and were pumping me full of penicillin, warning that my temperature might go up a little before it dropped. But I quickly felt worse. Adrift.

  As the drug seeped into my bloodstream, I was visited by an hallucination: the foggara Jed and I had visited in Timimoun, the water rushing through the comb-like gateways, kesrias, distributed into channels according to need, feeding the gardens of the palm grove and its people.

  The desert as a body.

  Rivers as arteries.

  Water the desert’s blood.

  Suddenly so much of what I’d experienced as thrilling, almost transcendent, over those last few months now loomed alien and precarious, like a lover reviled for the same qualities that had once attracted. And as the visions and my fever surged, I was besieged by a sole fear: that I would die in the desert.

  Jed paced the room.

  He’d brought the thermometer with him and kept shoving it under my arm.

  ‘Quarante-deux,’ he said, thrusting the thermometer in front of the nurse who’d come in to see why I wasn’t drinking the tea I’d been offered.

  ‘Ça va, monsieur,’ she reassured him.

  Even through the haze of the fever I realised that forty-two wasn’t good.

  Jed ripped back the soiled sheet. Got me the hell out of there. Drove me to Tamanrasset, where we’d become friendly with a part-Arab, part-Tuareg family after meeting the oldest son at a café in town.

  The lounge room was cleared for our use, except during the French news. The mother came and went, hovered over me, her bukar sometimes appearing as blue as lapis, at other times like folds in a night sky. They dosed me up on a mix of aspirin that Jed had tracked down in a local pharmacy and boiled lemons from the tree in their courtyard, its trunk the axle around which the house turned. The sisters worked shifts with Jed – kept me hydrated, mopped my forehead – their Saharan Arabic half-guttural, half healing song.

  Three nights later I woke in a lake of my own sweat, lucid, newborn. Because that was how it felt: like I’d emerged from a world of water into one whose forms were truer than anything I’d ever known. It didn’t last long, but for several days afterwards life felt rich and free of its usual fetters, at times ecstatic. And beneath it all a sense of reprieve and a recognition of the part Jed had played.

  ‘You would’ve done the same,’ he said when I tried to broach the subject.

  As most of my ordeal had passed in a blur, parts were patchy, details later recounted by Jed – to me and anyone else we came across on the road who had an ear for a yarn and time to spare. It had good currency as far as desert stories went – thirst, the tyranny of isolation, a clear risk of death – and he’d milked it for all it was worth. Injected his own allegorical humour to the point where it sounded like some Faustian tale: a soul waged against a life lived on the sandy edge.

  But despite my delirium at the time, there was one image in particular that broke through the fug of those days: the dark half-circles under Jed’s eyes as he’d leant over me and wiped sweat from my face with his blue cheche.

  And words, syrupy through the fever.

  For fuck’s sake, Saul, don’t die on me.

  51

  The mulga lit easily, its thirsty leaves snapping
and popping, the night quickly reduced to what was illuminated by it. The sand still held warmth and, with the addition of the fire, only my back monitored the drop in temperature. The moon had risen as the sun set and was already making its way west, out towards Lasseter’s cave and the border. The flies had metamorphosed into mosquitoes, water somewhere nearby. If I’d chosen to be here, to camp beside the road, it would’ve been a different story, and I tried to enter that one. To nuzzle my tin of ravioli into the first embers with a sense of adventure. But darkness was paying out on free will.

  My car sat beneath the desert oak under which it had rolled to a standstill, its steel blue reduced to a leaden grey. It had kept me company often enough. Light reflected off the bumper bar, despite the dust. I grabbed my jacket out of the back, noticed that the door wasn’t properly closed. Checked the internal light to make sure it hadn’t died and taken the battery with it.

  The ravioli began to boil on one side. With a couple of sticks, I twisted the tin around, careful not to kick up any ash. It smelt good and I began to make plans. Keep turning till it’s warmed through evenly. Eat it with some of that sourdough I bought in Alice. Scrub the tin with sand and boil some of the remaining water to make tea. Then grab some sleep. Start walking before sunrise.

  Another branch on the fire and the night felt more familiar, even when the wind began to pick up in the mulga, the will will nagging at some old superstition. I removed the tin, a well already made for it in the sand. Despite its mass production it promised good things. I dug in with the fork I’d bought at the op shop in St Kilda, so far away now; probably the same place where Jed had bought that book with the Harwood poem. The wrecked thing that could not bear the light. The sauce was good and salty, but the filling was meat-poor and pulpy, the pasta soft.

  To the south, high beams picked out the ridges and leapt into the sky. Made icons of tree trunks in the darkness.

  I jumped up.

  Considered ducking behind a tree – it could be anybody. But my car was sitting there, big and blue and evidence. Besides, the night was beginning to take its toll.