by Colin Dray
Katie mouthed something.
‘I think I remember a sign. Yes. I saw a sign that said there’s a service station. Fifteen minutes or so up the road.’ Dettie pointed with her dead cigarette.
‘I want cereal,’ Katie’s voice creaked.
‘Somewhere near that horse farm we went past, I think,’ Dettie was rearranging the weight of the handbag on her knees. ‘Great big sign it was.’
‘What’s that, my sweet?’ Jon nodded towards Katie.
‘Hmm?’ Dettie spun towards him, her lips pursed. ‘That huge sign we passed,’ she sighed. ‘Not far back. We’re talking about eating something.’
Jon smiled, blinking at her, and gestured to Katie. ‘Sorry, love,’ he said. ‘I meant our littlest lady.’
Katie lifted herself up on her arms. ‘I don’t want an omelette,’ she said, her voice more forceful. More natural. ‘Or orange juice. I want cereal.’
‘Cereal?’ Dettie scoffed. ‘You don’t have to eat cereal. We’re on a big trip. Special. It’s a treat. I’m treating you.’
Katie shook her head. ‘Muesli.’
Dettie sighed. ‘Well, they probably won’t have muesli,’ she said. ‘Truck drivers don’t eat it much.’
Scowling, Katie slumped, her head sinking into her shoulders.
‘Goodness, girl, I don’t know why you have to make things so difficult.’
‘You know,’ Jon cleared his throat softly, ‘I think I’ve seen cereal for sale at those places. Little boxes.’
Dettie snapped her purse closed and waved it, her nails digging into the leather. ‘Oh, fine. That’s fine then. Whatever you all want. You decide. Just be sure to let me know. I am only the driver, after all.’ She turned and settled herself behind the wheel.
Jon hummed, glancing briefly at the children. ‘I can drive for an hour or two, love,’ he said. ‘If you want to rest a spell.’
‘No, no, I’ll do it,’ she sang, almost laughing. ‘I’ll drive. I’ll buy the food. I’ll plan the trip.’ She shoved the purse down into her handbag. ‘And I’ll be the wicked old witch while I’m at it too, shall I?’
She shot a glare back at Sam and Katie through the rear-vision mirror. Her expression was all the more frightening for its bloodshot eyes and the shadows that still hung on her skin.
As the car started, its headlights snapped across a fence just ahead of them. Dettie reversed and Sam saw a sheep’s skull caught in a twist of barbed wire. Behind them the sky was seething red.
46
Katie ate two single-serve packets of honey-toasted muesli, and slurped every spoonful of milk, savouring either the sound, or the flavour, or the way it made Dettie fidget impatiently.
‘Come on, come on, girl,’ she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. ‘We don’t have all day.’ She’d taken an aspirin, but it didn’t seem to be working. She rubbed her eyes and drew circles on her forehead with her fingertips, humming a kind of tuneless music to herself.
Everyone else was done and their plates had already been cleared, so when Katie finally finished, they paid the bill and got up to go to the toilet. By the time Sam returned, Jon was already out in the car park, circling the car, examining it. Katie was with him, having not waited for their aunt, and was waving her arms dramatically as she spoke, bouncing, and holding up her handkerchief in the breeze to dry.
Sam watched her as he crossed the restaurant, through the jangle of the cash register and the burble of the television on the countertop, trying to work out what it was she might be saying. He could still remember his mother giving that handkerchief to his sister while he was in hospital, the way she had closed Katie’s fingers over it as she told her to keep it safe. About how it would hold her tears, and she’d be happy again when it dried. But as he thought back he found he was having trouble recalling the exact sound of her voice. Just as the tone of his own speech had gradually faded from his memory, it seemed his mother’s was slipping too.
The thought made Sam’s stomach lurch. He closed his eyes, concentrating, trying to hold on to the last of it, to summon it back to his ears. Suddenly it was important—desperately important—that he succeed. The thought of losing it was terrifying.
Then there it was. He could hear her clearly. So clearly she must have been standing in the room. Just behind him.
‘…my children home,’ she said. Her exact voice. Warm and flinty, and sounding oddly choked, but definitely her.
He turned, checking the restaurant tables. Two truck drivers and a man in overalls, a young couple, half-asleep, and the television, facing away from him, chattering on with some kind of news report. She wasn’t there. But he could have sworn—
Dettie, who was waiting by the door, gripped his shoulder, hard, and heaved him out into the street. He tried to resist, pointing back inside, but she was striding towards the car, hissing. ‘Come on. Get in. Everyone. Go. Hurry.’
‘What’s wrong, love?’ John said, jumping down from the railing he’d been perched upon.
‘Nothing. We just—we don’t have all day. Now get in.’
She unlocked the doors, quickly, and ushered them all inside, desperately scanning the restaurant window behind her. And as the car wheezed to life Sam thought back to the moment she had grabbed him. About the spiteful, angry look she had been shooting at the television set.
47
The morning sunlight lay heavy on the backs of their necks. Patches of vegetation were giving way to long stretches of umber earth, punctuated by tufts of thorny brush and a sky so wide and blue it stung the eyes. Dettie was driving faster, more aggressively, overtaking other motorists and gunning the accelerator, but the pulse and sway of the car, sweeping across lanes, grumbling back into place, was oddly soothing. Jon and Katie were soon asleep again in the back seat, each slumped over, mouths agape. Sam watched the few trees that still peppered the horizon slash by. Many were tall, ashen tangles of branches, all erupting at once from ground level, as though their trunks had been sucked down into a dried-over riverbed, choked and seized in place.
The radio was on but turned low. Dettie kept one ear tilted to listen. When the news reports came on she would raise the volume slightly, her fingers clenching the dial from the moment the intro played until the sign-off trumpeted its way back to the music playlist.
At first Sam had been thinking about how clearly he had heard his mother’s voice—how peculiar it had been, as though she had crawled momentarily out of his mind, spoken, and then disappeared. It reminded him of the zombie comic. How the woman had heard the zombie’s shadowy howls across the distant hills, echoing, but clear. He was tired of reading the comic, though, and his eyes were heavy in the warmth, so he just lay back in his seat, occasionally practising his name back to himself—pinkies, thumb, palm: Sam. Otherwise he just let the noise of the news drift over him, his gaze tracing across the same details of the car’s cabin he’d been staring at for days.
The radio’s hushed patter carried on, Dettie’s face clenching into a panicked scowl whenever the news anchor spoke. A government official was reminding everyone of the strength and severity of the fire front. It was not to be underestimated at any cost, he was saying. There were still fire-fighting volunteers travelling in from other states, but more were needed.
Sam knew every millimetre of the car’s cabin by now. The tear in the dashboard, its split plastic exposing an eruption of yellow foam. The floor mat beneath his feet, still marked with a lick of dried mud. The five-cent coin jiggling in the ashtray.
A farmer who had lost his property was being interviewed, his voice catching as he spoke. ‘So fast,’ he sobbed. ‘No time to get the cattle out.’
The steering wheel was worn down in the grooves where Dettie had rubbed her thumbs over the years. A starfish crack at the edge of the window was lit gold by the sun.
A family had been reported missing—Dettie’s hand shook on the dial, the volume dipping—after their holiday house was consumed at a caravan park. She let the sound rise again.
A single slat on the passenger side air vent was broken, slanted against the force of the fan gushing against it. The paddle-pop boomerang was marked with the indents of teeth.
Once the weather report was over—a total fire ban was in place, record temperatures expected—the music returned and Dettie lowered the volume, releasing the stereo knob and straightening herself to glare at the road ahead.
Sam felt the same itchy upholstery against his elbows as he lifted the hem of his T-shirt and directed the breeze onto his belly. He could barely remember a time when his body wasn’t resonating with the ride, the car vibrating its persistent, deadening thrum beneath and through him.
Up ahead on the road, yet another mound of roadkill was emerging from the haze. It was a large kangaroo, torn open at the stomach. Two crows were perched on its flank, feasting. As the car sped by he saw one digging its beak into the wound like a knife. For the first time Sam didn’t feel a lurch of revulsion at the sight. In fact, when he thought about it, it didn’t seem that horrible anymore. With the stories of fires raging out there somewhere—people missing, animals being burnt alive, the numb fear in people’s voices as they spoke into the reporter’s microphone—the remains of some creature on the road wasn’t so scary by comparison. It seemed natural, actually. The kangaroo was already long dead. The birds and ants and bugs needed to feed.
For all of her eccentricities, Dettie was right about one thing: they were out in the wild now. And there were worse things to worry about than a chunk of dead meat. Beside him, she shook her head ever so slightly to herself. A tiny involuntary twitch, persisting as she dug her thumbs into the grooves they had already worn into the steering wheel. She spurred the engine on.
48
‘So what brought you out here?’ Dettie was peering at Jon from the corner of her eyes, stirring her tea with its bag.
Sam was surprised they had even stopped. Katie had to plead for an hour to get something to drink, and even then Dettie only agreed to buy something from a service station if they waited to drink it at a rest stop further along the road. They were running late, she said, and had to make up time; but as Sam had held her styrofoam cup on his knee, watching it lap at the plastic lid and waiting to find somewhere to pull over, he wondered why it made any difference where they stopped—at the service station, or out on the highway?
‘What brought me out here?’ Jon looked up from untying his laces.
‘Australia,’ Dettie said. ‘Why travel all the way from England to Australia?’ She wasn’t glaring exactly, but there was a stern look to her expression that made it seem like Jon was being interrogated. And while everyone else sat at the rest-stop picnic table, she hovered, shifting weight from foot to foot, watching every car that grumbled by. ‘Why not Paris? Ireland?’ She took a small sip and held the cup firmly between both hands.
Jon slipped off his shoe. He hummed. ‘I guess the usual answer is probably the surf, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘That or the beer. That’s what the tourists say back home. Soak up the sun. Drink the beer. See the sports. Except, of course, I don’t surf, or watch cricket. Your sun has already turned me to leather. And forgive me for saying, but I don’t know what people are talking about with the beer. Your lager tastes like water.’
Jon had bought a lemon squash, along with Katie and Sam, and would periodically turn to swig the warm, fizzless drink. He lifted his foot, laying it on his opposite knee and dusting off the sole. Sam could see a hole worn into the edge of his sock, stretching the length of his big toe.
‘Of course, it is lovely here. That’s for certain,’ he said. ‘In England right now it’s winter. Cold. Grey. Who wouldn’t prefer a bit of light? But to be honest, growing up in the UK, it’s—’ He seemed to be about to say something, but exhaled instead. ‘Well, I wanted to get away. Something different. But familiar, you know? Something not so—so rigid.’
Dettie’s eyes narrowed. ‘Rigid?’ she repeated.
Katie had swiped five biscuits from the packet lying open on the picnic table, and was stacking them up on top of one another. She would take a bite from one and then move it to the bottom of the pile as she chewed, playing her own strange little tower game as she listened.
‘See, you lot don’t really have a class system here, do you?’ Jon said. ‘Do you know much about all that?’
Dettie tilted her head. It seemed she didn’t really know, but wasn’t going to admit as much.
‘In England everybody’s obsessed with class,’ he said. ‘What class are you in? Upper class? Working class? They obsess about it. This old social pecking order—real ancient stuff—stretching back to the days of the landed gentry and working serfs. It’s the kind of toffee-nosed, blue-blood, self-righteous system you would have thought they’d thrown out with powdered wigs. But no. There are people who are obsessed with it. They make sure it gets baked into everything. The schools you go to. The jobs you get. The clubs you get allowed in. Who you date. Where you live.’ He grunted. ‘Meanwhile, we have the bottle to call the French snobs.’
He fished inside his shoe, fingers scraping at something on the sole. ‘It’s exhausting,’ he said. ‘It wears you down. Makes you fed up. Makes you old before your time.’
A small stone tumbled down into the dirt. ‘This cloud hanging over you every moment of every day,’ he said. ‘Knowing that no matter what—what you do, where you go, how much you make—you’re going nowhere because some inbred wankers—’
Dettie snorted, coughing tea from her lungs.
‘Sorry,’ he said, quickly. ‘Sorry, love. Sorry. Sorry, kids. I mean, wowsers. Wowsers.’
She caught her breath, theatrically flicking drops of tea from her fingers as she shook her head. Katie was sitting up, smiling widely, trying to remember what Jon had said that got such a reaction.
‘It just gets frustrating when you see it everywhere,’ he went on. ‘Something that meaningless. Something so utterly arbitrary. All because a bunch of—’ he shot Dettie an apologetic look, ‘wowsers don’t want us poor trash getting a seat at their restaurant. Breathing all their rarefied air.’
He took another mouthful of lemon squash and swished it around his teeth. ‘It’s just nice to be over here for a little while,’ he said. ‘To be out from under all that for a spell.’
Dettie’s lips were curled, but she offered him a quick nod.
Katie went back to absently scratching two biscuits together, making a small pile of crumbs on the table. ‘So if you don’t have any money,’ she said, ‘you have to stay having no money?’
‘Sort of, sweetie. A little bit.’ Jon slipped his shoe back on and began retying his laces. ‘Only, it’s not really money, so much. It’s the way people treat you. You can get rich—people do. Actors, writers, sportspeople. But if you were born working class—even if you were born middle—anyone who thinks they’re an upper-class person will look down on you as worthless. Unworthy. You’re born in your box, you’ll stay in your box.’
‘That sounds horrible,’ Katie said.
‘We’re England, sweetie. I suspect we invented horrible.’
Dettie sighed, rolling her eyes. ‘Well, yes, I’m sure there are some who abuse their place,’ she said. ‘But it’s hardly all bad. There is refinement, isn’t there? Breeding and civility. And there’s something to be said for aristocracy. For having people to look up to.’
Jon slumped back against the table. Over on the highway a couple of cars fizzed by. He gave a grim smile and shrugged.
Katie stared over at Dettie like she had just spoken a foreign language. ‘What?’ she said.
‘Kings and queens, dear. A whole history—a living history—reaching back to the very birth of the country itself.’ Dettie was peering off into the distance, out at the baked brown undulations of the horizon. ‘It’s all very romantic.’
Jon stood up, rolling his shoulders. ‘But it’s all just an idea, love,’ he said. He stretched his back and started pacing, very slowly, in place. ‘Some mad nonsense someone dreamt u
p back in the Dark Ages. Royal bloodlines. Heraldry. Family crests. All just excuses for one group of posh tossbags to push everyone else around. To say get off my land, don’t touch my stuff.’
Sam had gotten used to watching Jon’s hands when he talked, and even though he wasn’t signing anything, his gestures showed he was getting agitated. They sliced at the air. His fingers were stiff. Even his elbows seemed locked tight.
‘And they learn it so young,’ he was saying. ‘I was a white-van man for a while. My dad, he was a white-van man, after he finished up at the mechanics. Do a bit of handiwork. Fix your car. Make you a shelf. Build you a rabbit hutch. That sort of thing. If you could see the way these toffs look through you. Even their little prep-school kids. Like you’re not even there. It turns your blood cold.’
Dettie stared down into her cup. The tea had already cooled. She was actually nodding, but Sam noticed the deliberate, delicate way she was holding it by the rim, her pinkies very slightly raised.
‘Still,’ she said, ‘I think there’s something to be said for breeding.’ The string of her tea bag hung matted in a stain of dried milk on the side of her cup. ‘Wish we had a little more of it in this country. Civility.’ That last word she seemed to want to hold on to as she spoke it, stretching it out. Sam thought of Roger. Dettie’s insistence on those ‘cultural differences’ Roger and his mother had supposedly faced. How ‘unfamiliar’ he apparently was.
Jon sighed. ‘Oh no. No, don’t wish for civility, love. You don’t know how good you’ve got it here. You lot are young. You’re not stiff and decayed like us.’ He looked out at that same horizon Dettie was peering into and clearly saw something else. ‘The way I figure it,’ he said, ‘two hundred years ago we packed up all the interesting people and sent them out here. And the best thing you lot did—the best thing—was toss all that lords and gentry nonsense in the bin.’ He yanked the waist of his pants. ‘Still got Her Majesty’s head on your coins,’ he said. ‘Looking a might younger than in reality, I’ll add—but otherwise you’ve gotten on with it.’