Sign

by Colin Dray

  33

  ‘Did you get enough to eat, Katie?’ Dettie was watching the other motorists in the car park, studying their expressions as she unlocked the car. Her voice had a tiny squeak.

  Katie crawled into the back seat. She tossed the colouring books and box of crayons Dettie had just bought her onto the floor. She clipped together her seatbelt and went back to folding another drooping swan from her mother’s handkerchief.

  She had been quiet for hours now, and Sam couldn’t actually remember the last time she’d said anything. Even when their father had left she’d yelled and stormed around the house, and cut the hair off all her dolls. But now she was still all the time, and wouldn’t smile. He had tried playing Tic-Tac-Toe with her earlier in the car. Offered to fix her ponytail. But whenever he looked at his sister, her eyes would just drift down his face as she turned away.

  ‘I bet you feel better after that nice hot shower this morning,’ Dettie said, turning the key in the ignition. The strange new noise in the engine started again almost immediately, rattling somewhere behind the steering wheel.

  Katie lifted her head to look out the window at a family unloading an esky from their station wagon.

  Dettie coughed. ‘You know, Katie, it’s very frustrating talking to a brick wall all the time,’ she said, and peered over her shoulder to reverse out of their parking space. ‘You and I—we have a very important role in this car.’ She popped the car into gear and steered it around the service station. ‘We provide conversation. Poor Sammy can’t do it, can you, love?’ She flashed Sam a tight smile and went back to talking into the rear-vision mirror. ‘So we can’t afford to keep ignoring each other, can we?’

  Katie turned towards the front of the car and peered at the approaching intersection emerging from the heat.

  ‘I thought we’d all forgiven one another,’ Dettie sighed. ‘Put all this silliness behind us. Were moving on.’

  Katie sat up. ‘Help me.’

  ‘What?’ Dettie turned. ‘What was that, sweetie?’

  Katie leant forward and pointed through the windscreen. ‘Help me,’ she said, louder.

  When he followed her gaze, over towards the upcoming intersection, Sam could see a hitchhiker, standing at the side of the road. A weathered, brown shape among the dust and haze, with two bags lying behind his feet. But he was smiling, holding a cardboard sign that read, Help me, I’m British.

  SIGN

  34

  ‘Thanks for that, love. Much appreciated.’ The hitchhiker swung his legs into the car and pulled the door shut. With his bags in the boot, he snapped on his seatbelt and sat stiffly in the back behind Dettie, clutching his knees.

  When Dettie looked down at the dried mud crusted on his shoes, it was as though there was something sour in her mouth. ‘Our little Samaritan is the one to thank,’ she said, gesturing back at Katie with her thumb. ‘She would’ve sulked the rest of the trip if we’d left you out there.’

  ‘In that case, thank you very much, young miss,’ the hitchhiker said, nodding to Katie.

  He was English, and when he spoke his voice sounded like he was about to break into a laugh. Sam turned to sneak a better look. The hitchhiker had a thick brown beard and grey eyes. He was thin, and his shirt hung too large from his neck, exposing the length of his clavicle, ballooning where it tucked into his pants. He smelt like linen warmed by the sun, and when he ruffled his hair flecks of pollen and dust came drifting out. When the hitchhiker noticed Sam peering at him, he smiled.

  ‘Morning,’ he said, raising his eyebrows. Sam waved back.

  Dettie put the car in gear, pulled out from the side of the road and hopped back up onto the highway. Everyone jerked in their seats, and as she sped off, the motor howled, the shuddering inside it increasing. ‘So where are you trying to get to?’ she asked.

  The hitchhiker folded up his cardboard sign and stuffed it behind his legs. ‘Not any place in particular,’ he said. ‘Just travelling.’

  Nobody said anything, so he cleared his throat. ‘Spent some time up on your Gold Coast there,’ he said. ‘Bit of Sydney. Tried Adelaide out for a while. Thought I might head out west. A friend of mine said I should check out Monkey Mia. Have you been at all?’

  ‘And that’s what you do, is it?’ Dettie snorted a laugh. ‘Travel around?’

  The hitchhiker scratched inside his beard. ‘For now,’ he said, shrugging, the gesture almost entirely muffled by the saggy mass of his clothes. ‘Just doing the rounds.’

  ‘And that pays well, does it?’

  When he’d unwound a kink in his seatbelt, he looked around and smiled. ‘And where are you lovely people off to?’

  ‘We’re going to Perth,’ Katie said.

  The hitchhiker whistled.

  ‘Three days it’s took so far,’ Katie said, ‘but we’re going fast and not stopping. We sleep in the car even. And we bought new clothes when we needed them. Also, one time there was this boy who broke a tooth—’

  ‘So have you got a name then?’ Dettie’s voice rose, drowning her out.

  The hitchhiker was nodding at Katie, but he looked up. ‘Oh, yes. Sorry, love,’ he said. ‘It’s Jon.’

  Dettie adjusted herself in her seat. ‘Sorry, it’s Mr…?’

  ‘No, don’t bother with the niceties, love. Jon’s fine.’

  She inhaled, loudly, through her nose. ‘Well. Mr Jon,’ she said, ‘that’s Katie in the back with you, and this here is Sam. He doesn’t talk.’

  Sam was expecting him to ask why, or to look shocked, but Jon only nodded. ‘Had a good dose of sun there, me mate.’

  For the first time that morning the sunburn on Sam’s face throbbed again, and he dipped his head.

  Jon began folding back his shirtsleeve. ‘I grew up in Manchester,’ he said. ‘We see the sun there about twice a year if we’re lucky. So you can imagine when I got out here, I was lily white. And the first day—the first day—I got off the plane, I got burnt worse than I ever have in my life. Just walking the streets. Giant blisters all over me.’

  Dettie kept breathing loudly through her nose.

  ‘A few days later, though, when the glow went down,’ Jon held up his forearm, ‘this was what was under it.’ His skin was as brown as Sam’s grandfather’s had been after working all those years on the farm. ‘You watch, me mate, in a couple of days you’ll have a better tan than any of us.’

  Sam felt his sunburn throb again, but this time it didn’t hurt. He almost liked the tight feeling on his skin.

  The car drifted towards the side of the road and kicked gravel up under the floor. Dettie stopped peering in the mirror, frowned, and jerked the steering wheel so that the tyres remounted the asphalt.

  Jon was tapping on his knees, whistling. He fiddled with the ashtray near the doorhandle, and turned to look at Katie. ‘So how about you, sweetheart?’ he said. ‘I bet you got all the boys running after you.’

  Katie scrunched up her nose. ‘Eww! No!’ she groaned, but she was blushing.

  ‘She most certainly does not!’ Dettie snapped. ‘And I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head.’

  ‘Sorry, love,’ he said, puffing out his cheeks. ‘Didn’t mean nothing by it.’

  When he noticed Sam looking at him, he rolled his eyes. Sam spun back around, covering a smile with his hands. Beside him, Dettie was glaring at the road, her expression narrowed and tight.

  Jon grasped his shirt and lifted it up and down to fan his chest. He glanced around at all the windows, wound shut, and leant forward. ‘Just realised I didn’t catch your name, love,’ he said, over the hiss of the vents.

  Sam noticed his aunt’s eye flicker, but she didn’t respond.

  A moment passed until Katie sat up again, bouncing in her seat. ‘That’s Aunt Dettie,’ she said.

  ‘Dettie, eh?’ Jon leant forward against Sam’s seat back and rested his chin on his arm. He whistled. ‘Can’t say I’ve heard that before. Is it short for anything?’

  The plastic of the steeri
ng wheel squeaked under Dettie’s grip.

  Katie hummed, ‘Um…nope. Just Dettie. Aunty Dettie.’

  ‘It’s Bernadette,’ Dettie exhaled, shaking her head.

  Jon tilted his ear towards her. ‘What’s that, love?’

  ‘Bernadette. My name.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jon grinned at her, exposing a mouthful of cluttered teeth. ‘Like the saint.’

  Dettie glared at him, eyes narrowed, but when he kept grinning back, her face softened. As she turned back to the road a faint look of surprise tickled her lips. They drove on, her shoulders relaxing more with every passing kilometre.

  35

  Ice cream ran between Sam’s fingers and down his wrist. He licked the back of his thumb clean and watched the closest seagull squawking angrily, ruffling its feathers as it charged another bird. Katie’s paddle-pop was sliding off its stick and she had to duck to scoop it into her mouth. Her chin was wet with chocolate ice cream and her shirt was stained. Almost breathless, she was slurping up as much as she could before it all melted.

  Travelling through Port Augusta, having crossed one dried-up lake that had cracked into large mud plates, Dettie had decided to stop at the next shoreline. After crossing a narrow bridge, they’d pulled over near a small dock where people were using a concrete ramp to load their boats into the water, and where a pink Mr Whippy van had parked. Dettie had let Jon buy them all ice creams, and was nibbling her own lime-flavoured icy pole, holding it at a distance, one hand poised to catch the runoff. The car was parked behind them, near a pair of bins, and they were standing beside a long wooden jetty that reached out into the rippling water.

  For the first time in days Sam felt a crisp breeze creeping beneath his singlet and up his back. His teeth were numb as he bit into the last of the paddle pop, letting it melt away in his mouth. Jon had finished his in four lazy bites and was chewing on the stick. No one had spoken since they’d parked. Katie’s attention had been on her ice cream; Dettie, who clutched her handbag tightly to her side whenever Jon was close by, had tested each of the car’s wheels with her foot; and Jon strolled with his arms stretched out, tilting his head back in the sunlight to let the wind whip through his clothes, pinning them to his body.

  In the sky two birds caught an updraft and were lifted higher, their wings trembling. Two long brown bridges, one newer than the other, both uplifted on crisscrossing pylons, snaked off into the distance, uniting both sides of the town. People as small as ants were fishing from the smaller of the pair, riding bikes and walking its length with dogs. Several white sailboats bobbed on the surface of the water.

  ‘Is everyone done?’ Dettie asked, winding the wrapper around her stick.

  ‘Just a second, love.’ Jon yawned. ‘You might want to take a bit of a breather while you can. Look around. It’s a hell of a view.’

  Dettie cleared her throat, jerking her head towards Katie and Sam.

  ‘What’s that, love?’

  ‘The language.’ Dettie raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Right.’ Jon nodded. ‘Sorry, love. Heck of a view, kids.’

  ‘Just say “nice view”.’

  ‘Right.’

  Dettie had stayed back from the water’s edge, trying not to look out over the expanse. She hadn’t even crossed the boundary of the dirt car park. They had been driving together for a few hours now, and gradually she and Jon had stopped talking so cautiously to one another. She’d even stopped flinching when he called her love.

  The seagulls had given up on Sam and were crowding around Katie, cawing and twitching their open beaks.

  Jon tugged a map from his back pocket and sat down, spreading it out over a patch of grass. Sam knelt beside him as he was pinning it down with his shoe and a couple of pieces of bark, and watched him hunt out a strip of road that followed the coastline. Sam leant over to read the name of the closest town.

  ‘Wondering where we are, me mate?’ Jon shielded his eyes. The sun had just swung out from behind a cloud.

  Sam nodded.

  ‘Well,’ Jon bit his bottom lip as he turned the map towards Sam, ‘it looks like we’re smack in the middle of Port Augusta here.’ He jabbed at the name.

  Jon’s map was a little smaller than the one in the diner, and had been folded and refolded until it was breaking apart at the creases. In the area of ocean he had written comments and drawn arrows that led to the towns he must have visited. Under Melbourne it said Twisted ankle off tram, and pointing to a town called Millicent he had scrawled One eyed Geezer—story about shark hunt.

  Jon began tracing his finger along a highway leading west. There was nothing written yet under the arch of the Great Australian Bight.

  Sam tapped the paper, and then pointed at the road and his watch.

  ‘How long to go?’ Jon asked, and went back to measuring out the distance with his thumb. ‘I should say a good couple of days.’

  Sam tugged at the grass, nodding.

  Beside the car, seagulls had started pecking around the bins, snapping at one another. Sam watched them leaping into the air and gliding in small circles, but he became slowly distracted by his view of the car. Something about it didn’t look right, he realised. It seemed to be exactly the same, the same make and colour, and there were no new scratches or dents—but something had changed, he could tell. Nothing seemed to be missing. The aerial was still there, and the mirrors, but he felt as though he should have been noticing something; he just wasn’t sure what it was.

  ‘So, do you know any sign language, me mate?’ Jon said.

  Sam blinked. He let the grass blades in his fingers tumble back to the ground. He remembered Tracey clasping his hands. The pamphlet she’d given him on sign language, with its cartoon people, stiff and grey and dead-eyed. He shook his head and stared again at the map.

  ‘Never mind,’ Jon said. ‘A brother of an ex-girlfriend of mine—way back in the day—he was deaf. We all grew up together talking to him in sign. I know you’re not deaf, but I was thinking I might get a chance to dust off some of that. See what I remember. It’d be nice.’ He took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. ‘Although, that’s British sign,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if it’s different here.’

  Jon kept staring up at the clouds drifting above them. He sniffed and scratched his nose. Slowly, his eyes eased down until they focused on the stick still clenched between his teeth. ‘You want to see a dumb trick?’ he asked, and grinned. ‘Here, give us your garbage.’

  Nodding, Sam wiped the spit off his paddle-pop stick and held it out.

  ‘Oh, and I’ll need…Could you ask Katie for hers? And see if your aunt has still got one too? Could you do that?’ Jon wiped off his own stick and pinched the two together at a right angle.

  Dettie and Katie followed Sam back over. Dettie had insisted on rinsing hers off and was wiping it dry with her blouse.

  Taking the four sticks, Jon wound them into one another, their edges touching, the two inside sticks crossed. He had to strain to lock them in place, but when the four of them were knotted together they held, making the small frame of a boomerang. He lifted it up, hanging it on his finger.

  Katie laughed and Sam raised his thumbs.

  When Jon laid it down on the map, the tips of the boomerang stretched from the road they were on off into the midst of the Nullarbor.

  36

  The noise in the engine had gotten louder. It pattered, shrill and rhythmic, beneath the hood, and Sam wondered if something metal—perhaps something important—had broken loose and was thrashing around. It grew faster at higher speeds, and now that they were on a straighter patch of road, the sound was becoming impossible to ignore.

  Dettie had snapped the radio back on to drown it out, and skipping quickly over any news reports or talkback programs, she settled the dial on a station that boasted it played only ‘oldies’. At first syrupy love songs engulfed the car, overwrought duets that swelled with violins, and Sam could hear Dettie humming along under her breath. But when the lyrics to ‘Yellow Sub
marine’ began, Jon’s eyes lit up, and he stretched forward, tapping the side of Dettie’s seat.

  ‘Oh, louder, love,’ he said. ‘Louder. Please.’

  Surprised, Dettie chuckled a little, turning the music up, and by the time the sound of the waves had begun, Jon was singing loudly, swinging his fist through the air as though leading a sea shanty. His excitement was infectious as he leant over to sing close to everyone’s ears, and soon Dettie was warbling along too. By the second chorus, even Katie had started, bopping her head and murmuring the tune when she didn’t know the words.

  Sam, of course, could not sing. And as he sat and listened, realising that for once he hadn’t even bothered to try, an odd emptiness flooded through him. Suddenly, the crowd noise and the brass band behind the melody seemed creepy, almost ghostly, as he stared out at the empty roadside. He could feel the music wash over him, rhythmic and clanging, smothering: Katie’s flinty tones; the deep voice, rumbling and low, that Jon was putting on to make them laugh; and Dettie’s old-lady opera voice, trembling every time she held a note. There was a peculiar otherworldliness to the sound of it all. He couldn’t add anything to the cacophony, but felt it stirring the atmosphere of the car, quivering on his skin. It was as though he were a drum, his sunburnt flesh pulled tight and the submarine noises, the distant clanks and groans of the ship, amplified by the hollow in his chest.

  In the front seat Katie was rocking in place and smiling, and as Sam watched his sister and Dettie laughing together, he remembered—from what felt like months ago now—their strange dance in the kitchen when they prepared the apple pie for their mother’s dinner party. He could still picture the way they had swept through each other’s arms, powdered with flour and swapping spoons. For a moment they seemed to be back there again too, giggling at each other, sliding in and out of harmony.

  The song faded away, to be replaced by a crooning boy group, and as Dettie lowered the volume, despite Katie’s protests, she muttered something about smut. Slumping back in her seat, her arms crossed, Katie’s smile drained away. But her body wasn’t twisted as far away from her aunt as it had been before. In the sudden quiet, beneath the persistent hum of the air vents, the motor’s clatter persisted.