by Lia Hills
Behind the headlights was a white ute. It slowed and pulled up in front of me. I shielded my eyes, dust assembling in the beams. In the passenger seat, a kid, sixteen, eighteen maybe, no seatbelt on, his hair bleached. The window was wound down and the driver leant across, one of his front teeth sticking out further than the rest. It was the same two I’d seen before. The two I’d left behind.
‘Trouble?’ asked the driver.
‘Timing belt.’
‘Uwa,’ he said. Sucked on his bottom lip.
‘You heading to Ininyingi?’ I asked.
He flexed his eyebrows, looked down at the gearstick. It was impossible to tell how old he was. Maybe a grandfather. Maybe the same age as me.
‘I know Nara,’ I said, deciding the situation dictated a little stretching of the truth.
The driver said something I didn’t understand. The boy moved over.
‘Hang on a minute,’ I said. ‘Gotta grab a few things.’
I kicked sand over the fire, half expecting them to drive off and leave me there. Grabbed my backpack, my bedding, the box of food. Locked the doors, for what it was worth, no time for goodbyes.
I hauled my stuff over to the ute. The door to the cabin was open, but I could see that there was no room at the kid’s feet.
‘Can I put my gear in the back?’ I asked.
The driver shrugged and the boy laughed.
In the tray were two roos, big ones, their heads thrown back. One of them had been gutted, a scrap of intestine glossy in the moonlight. I shoved everything in the furthest corner, the metallic smell of blood fresh on them. Climbed into the cabin beside the boy, who was still wearing just a singlet despite the cold, Bob Marley sprawled across his chest. Something about love.
The driver shifted the ute into gear, and I noticed a tattoo on the back of his hand, homemade, illegible. I wanted to ask him his name, tell him mine, but we were already moving, shoulders pressed together. Half a bum cheek on the passenger seat, the kid’s arm was looped around the driver’s headrest. He reeked of underarm. Like any adolescent who hasn’t yet acquainted himself with deodorant, I reminded myself.
The headlights defined our sight – rock, grass, insects, sand – robbing everything of its colour. Homogenising. We passed the carcass of what once was a LandCruiser, tyres missing, its brakes crowns of rust. I turned to watch it recede into the darkness, its chassis like picked bones. My Subaru would be doomed to a similar fate if I didn’t take care of it soon.
The driver jutted his chin forwards and allowed it to divine the road. It was easy to see that he knew it well, even in the dark, his body shifting into position to take a corner before it entered the range of the beams. His padded black jacket was loose on his shoulders, his body barely a frame for his clothes. The backs of his hands had that chalky dryness that was already starting to take over mine.
My elbow banged into the kid and I tucked it in. Gripped my thigh more firmly, the other hand catching on the seatbelt that I’d thought about attaching, except no one else was wearing one.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
The driver raised his eyebrows. Realigned his gaze with that of the beams.
A bird swooped, probably an owl, and the driver slid forwards in his seat, rode the undulations as if it were water we were dealing with, not rock and sand. As dirt gave way to large stones, he shifted down a gear, the engine developing a strange rumble until I realised that it was him humming. I didn’t recognise the tune, but there was something familiar about it.
The front left wheel collected a rock, the shockies unflinching. My hand shot out to the dash, as did the kid’s beside me, but the ute kept going, no telltale thwack-thwack of a puncture. It rattled its way faithfully over the last rough patch before the track became flat and clear again. I wanted to ask about the rest of the road, but couldn’t muster a segue. The cab was theirs, and maybe it was cultural, maybe they were just buggered, but I’d spent enough time in other people’s territory to know you wait until you’re spoken to. Anyway, what difference would it make? Every kilometre brought me closer to where I was heading.
‘She your friend?’ asked the driver, scratching his throat.
‘Friend of a friend,’ I said.
52
The road widened, tyre tracks splitting off. Turned into bitumen. Houses were lined up on either side, spaced out, dim streetlights assisting the moon, their orange glow sieved through steel meshing. A few dogs raced to meet us, yapped at the hubcaps, trailed closely, their tails in overdrive. There were no people in sight though lights were on, one of the windows facing the street a square of flickering blue. We passed a health clinic, and something that looked like a school, a long snake painted along the side. An old man sitting on a bed on a verandah watched us go past. The driver put his hand out the half-open window. The man raised his hand in return.
We turned right into a dirt street. The signpost read Arnguli Road.
There were porch lights on in most of these houses too, each house painted a different colour, yellow, purple, ochre, blue, a flush of hot pink bougainvillea surprised in the headlights. We pulled up in front of one place, an upturned trike in the driveway, one of the pedals missing.
‘That one Nara’s house,’ said the driver.
The boy nodded in consensus.
‘Thanks.’ Then, remembering something Ziggy had told me, I said, ‘Palya.’
‘Palya,’ they replied, their eyebrows hoisted into the same wing-shape as if rehearsed.
I hesitated for a moment, wanted to raise the question of contributing to petrol, especially given the exorbitant price of it out here, but I didn’t know how to frame it.
‘I’ll just get my stuff,’ I said and reached for the handle, but the door didn’t want to budge.
The kid leant across me and shoved it hard as he could, underarm vying with a mix of oily hair and smoke and blood. The door sprung open and I nearly fell onto the road. There were nods all round as I hauled myself out. In the back of the ute, my pack was shoved against one of the slain roos. Lit by a streetlamp, the roo looked gaunt, too lean for much of a meal. A cardboard box was wedged underneath it. I dragged my gear out and tapped twice on the tray.
The engine revved tinnily before kicking forwards.
I stood in the orange light of the lamp till the ute was gone, its engine idling in a distant street for a bit before cutting out. Then I approached the house. The lock on the gate had been replaced with a safety belt buckle. It too stuck when I tried to open it, like there was some kind of conspiracy, but finally it gave.
The front yard was mostly sand with long-haired clumps of grass, a couple of dusty mulga, an office chair missing its armrests. I slung my pack on, picked up the box of food. There were no dogs to greet me, no automatic porch light, just a pile of blankets in one corner of the verandah, a metal bed with a bare mattress in the other. I heard voices, but they were coming from a neighbouring house. Saw the lava glow of a cigarette being drawn on in the dark.
I stepped up onto the verandah, a concrete slab covered with what I took at first to be bird shit, but the thin light from the streetlamp picked out colours and shine. Splotches of paint. I put down my stuff. Nara’s photo was back in my glove box, along with my torch, but I knew it by heart. Streaked hair tied back, her lips the same colour as her face. A classic Jed composition: the subject entering the frame from the left as if in a perpetual state of becoming.
I knocked and stood back. Checked my watch in the lamplight: 9:15. What constituted too late in a place like this? My hands pushed deeper into the pockets of my jeans. At any moment she could open the door.
Nara.
The one I’d driven all this way to see.
Who I’d imagined a hundred times over holding out her hand, welcoming me in.
More voices came from the other side of the mesh wire fence. Men’s drawls. A dog’s growl. A shout reined it in. There were no lights on in the house, a sheet hung over the window. Red dust had collected on the besser-bric
k sill, a fine powder.
‘Hello?’ I said to the door, aware of others who might be listening, of the dog that loitered, a rumble in its throat.
But there was no response.
No shuffle of feet or pushing aside of the makeshift curtain.
The ratcheting of a diesel engine a few streets over reminded me that I was now without a vehicle. The car did another lap, its headlights intermittently projected onto the wall of the house as it progressed. I tried again. Waited. Nothing.
Shoving the box of food into a corner of the verandah with my boot, I positioned my backpack in front of it. Covered the lot with a blanket. The dog trailed me to the gate, thwarted by the fence, a controlled growl escalating to a full-throttle bark as I made my way around to the house where it lived.
‘Hey, boy,’ I said, but it wasn’t having a bar of it.
On the verandah of this house sat three men, one on a couch, one on a mattress, the third with his legs hung over the rough-edged concrete slab, his feet warming on a fire. He raised the red ember of his cigarette towards the sky as he called to the dog. It took its place at the man’s feet, its tail a stiff arc. In the unpaved driveway sat an old Camry station wagon, one of its wheels chocked on a pile of bricks.
The guy on the couch pulled the front of his beanie over his eyebrows as if the dark offended him. They all looked about my age.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Nara.’
‘Nara?’ repeated the guy with the beanie, a bare foot poking out from beneath his blanket. He turned and shouted something towards the house, a name maybe.
The door opened and a woman drifted out, her short hair split by a part and combed flat against her head. There was something undeniably familiar about her, but she seemed too small to be Nara – though the photo I had was only of her head and shoulders – her cheeks too flat. Then again, the only light was coming from the cigarettes and the moon and the house, her body backlit.
The guy asked her a couple of questions in what I assumed was Pitjantjatjara. The woman kept an eye on me as she replied, raised her eyebrows in punctuation, her hand waving in the opposite direction from where I’d come in the ute. The guy on the bed clicked his tongue and nodded as the woman waved her hand again, went back into the house.
Pushing his beanie higher, he rubbed his forehead. Jerked his head in the direction the woman had indicated.
‘Nara not here. Maybe tomorrow.’
A muscle in my neck complained about the afternoon’s corrugation. I tried not to stare at him, not to blame the messenger. So what the fuck am I meant to do now? I wanted to ask him, but he hadn’t invited me here. Nobody had. All I’d been given was permission to come.
The guy closest to me, the dog quiet by his feet now, waved a finger in the direction of Nara’s house. ‘You sleep on that one bed there.’
Whatever else he was about to say was interrupted by the woman coming out the door again, carrying an enamel mug. She said something to the guy on the couch, looked at me, but he pointed to the guy with the dog. So she leant down and gave the mug to him, which he passed to me. It was hot and white and, going by its tannic smell, full of milky tea.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
I held the mug up in a salute, returned the nods, my eyebrows arching in a way they hadn’t for a long time, as if an old instinct was kicking in.
The woman went inside. The beanie was lowered. It was clear my business here was done.
‘Thanks,’ I said again. ‘Palya.’
‘Palya.’
I was escorted out by a low growl, just in case I hadn’t got the message. My boot caught on a tuft of buffel grass, almost sent me flying. Half the tea slopped onto the sand transformed by the streetlight into ripples of orange and black. The dog left me to it. Returned to its place by the fire.
Nara’s house lay quiet, vacated for the night, or maybe longer – I had no way of knowing. I undid the buckle on the gate. Crossed the yard. The place felt different now that I knew nobody was home.
I sat on the bed and tested its springs, careful not to spill any more of the tea. It was too milky, too sweet, but with some of the bread that I’d bought in Alice dipped in, it made up for the ravioli I hadn’t got to finish, probably an ants’ feast by now. And beside it my car, greyed by moonlight. I missed it suddenly. Experienced something like guilt. What the desert claims.
I shoved the empty mug under the bed, its metal scraping against the sandy concrete. Headed around the far side of the house, away from the mutt and its possible objection, and pissed beside a flour tin packed with dirt. The stalk of a dead plant, possibly a tomato, cast a curled shadow against the wall. I heard a noise, but it was too quick, the direction it came from too unclear, to be sure what it was. In the sand at my feet, small footprints I hadn’t noticed before.
A child’s.
Back on the verandah, I sat on the bed. Kicked my boots off. Spread out my sleeping bag, one blanket over the mattress, another rolled up to put under my head. The blankets smelt categorically of dog, and there was no escaping the moon, but next door the voices had reduced to almost nothing and the day felt stretched out, long and circuitous enough to be done with me. I dragged my car keys out of my pocket, where they’d been digging into my hip, fat lot of use now. Climbed into my sleeping bag. Pulled its hood over my head. I reeked of dust and sweat and tannin, my nostrils flaring at the dryness that coated everything. Ziggy had suggested I buy some saline spray but I hadn’t got around to it. A chemist seemed unlikely in a place like this, but there had to be a store.
Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe tomorrow, Nara would return from wherever it was she’d gone, and something about her eyes or the way she wrapped her hand around a mug of tea would feel like a reason for coming here.
But for the moment, there was only the night air, so cold that it was hard to imagine why this place was synonymous with the sun, everything quiet except for the crack of the roof adjusting and the belligerent yap of a dog.
It was answered by others.
By a voice that could be human.
But as I lay there willing sleep on the verandah of a house surrounded by desert, I felt like the last man on earth.
ngura
camp; place; country; home
Pitjantjatjara language, Western Desert
53
Hunger woke me; that, and children’s voices. They were standing on the other side of the fence, decked out in blue polo tops with yellow logos, their arms over the railing. Only half of them were wearing shoes. I made out the word ‘Nara’ but the rest was in Pitjantjatjara, which struck me momentarily as strange, as if the language of childhood was naturally English.
‘Hello,’ shouted a boy, blond tips in his long crew cut, his shorts a few years too big for him.
Still half in a funk over the previous day’s events, I was tempted to tell him to bugger off, but they were just kids being kids. I sat up, my sleeping bag falling to my waist. One of the girls shrieked with laughter – no need for a mirror.
‘Hi,’ I said, combing my hair with my fingers.
A volley of ‘hi’s came back, accented, a little girl with a wild mop of hair coming in a beat behind.
‘What your name?’ tried the ringleader, who was at least a head taller than the rest, but someone shouted at them from the house next door and they took off, their feet pounding on the unpaved road.
The concrete of the slab was still cold but the sun was not far off in the yard. I wrapped myself in a blanket. Dragged my arse around the side of the house to where I’d taken a leak the night before. The plant looked less convincingly a tomato in daylight, more like something that had crawled in from the desert but failed to take root in such confined ground. I thought about adding my water to it, but it was way too late for that.
Breakfast was a tin of tuna and an orange, my legs hanging over the edge of the slab. I licked the juice of the orange from my forearm and began to make plans. Walk around a bit, find out where the shop was; see
if anyone knew where Nara had gone. Buy that stuff for my nose if they had any. Get more water. Stake out a proper toilet.
But two magpies were fighting over a piece of wrapper by the fence – each hauling its scrap into a hollow of sand with the kind of covetousness usually only seen at Boxing Day sales – and the sun had reached the edge of the concrete, and a pigeon was cooing from a wattle in the corner of the yard with a voice so somniferous it felt chemical. So I sat back, my shoulders against the wall that had turned out to be the blue of church roofs on Greek islands, and waited for a reason to move.
Studied the wind as it travelled down the street, the way it manifested itself in dust.
Kept an eye out for what it might bring back.
•
The next time I woke, there were no kids, nobody else around either, at least not visible from where I was sitting. I found a tap by the corner of the house, let the rush of cold bore water run over my face and into my mouth. Checked my reflection in the window of the house. Reassured myself I didn’t look too much like a madman before heading out the gate.
The dog was waiting for me, but this time some allowance seemed to have been made for the night I’d spent here. There was no one on the verandah, the fire dead. The dog dipped its head and pawed at the sand like an indecisive bull. Didn’t bark as I walked away. The street joined a more major one, the road I’d come in on, one lane of red-hemmed bitumen, its edges eaten at. The houses lining it sat mostly in dusty yards dotted with the occasional mulga, desert oak, a few struggling eucalypts or a dark peppermint tree, one so full of bees it sounded like it was breathing. On the verandahs there were beds and mattresses and couches, one old sofa so bleached across the back and arms that the rest seemed thrown into shadow. Tufts of polysester fibre exploded from its sun-weary seams.
And everywhere leaves and rubbish were caught in the wire fences. Chip packets. Chocolate wrappers. A disposable nappy. Flotsam spewed up not by water but wind. A frayed plastic bag trapped in the branches of a wattle flapped white and oddly beautiful. Around a green wheelie bin lay a sprawl of flavoured-milk cartons and plastic cutlery, an old car battery oxidised beyond use. I stopped in front of it. Fished around in my pockets till I found bits of wrapper and a docket from Yulara, the lifted lid releasing three flies and the sweet smell of rotting. The bin was almost empty. I dropped my stuff in. Felt the unease of occupying the moral high ground. Walked away.