by G. S. Bailey
She clung to the steering wheel and stuck behind the caravan. The five lane highway reduced to four then three lanes, with the traffic dissipating as it left the southern edge of the Gold Coast and sped off along the coastal plain toward Sydney—not that Clair had any intention of going anywhere near Sydney. “No chance of that,” she muttered to herself, checking her map to confirm the picture she had in mind of her route.
The national highway connecting Brisbane and Sydney largely followed the Pacific coast, or at least remained on the coastal apron, east of the Great Dividing Range. Clair’s first hour of travel was flat, open expressway cutting through lush farmland and skimming across tidal creeks and rivers. Even in winter everything was green, with the sub-tropical climate ensuring a fruitful mix of rain and sunshine right through the cooler months. The cold snap of the previous few days had been overpowered by a northerly air mass, pulling warm, moist air down from the equatorial regions of Asia. The day was still cool, but Clair had the car heater turned off as the sun shining in through the driver’s side window created an Indian summer environment.
An hour into her journey the Indian summer ended. The GPS navigator had directed her to turn off the main highway, and heading west, she wound through low, heavily timbered hills with the mid-afternoon sun having set behind the mountain range looming in the distance.
Clair munched on chips as she drove. It was better being on a quieter road, without the trucks. She relaxed into the tranquillity of nature sweeping silently by. The car was noiseless and powerful. It had actually been close to a year since she was last behind the wheel, and that had added to her nervousness, but such had passed, and zooming through the lush green fields with cows securely fenced away from the road, Clair gave herself over to the freedom of her escape.
She notched the heater up a bit. Indian summer had seriously ended. The forest shadows were deep and dark, and with the mountains looming closer, the open fields were being crowded into small parkland clearings. The road also began to wind this way and that and climb fairly steadily. Clair used the overtaking lanes. She wasn’t for the slow lane anymore, and there seemed to be a lot of old people towing caravans.
Another several hours of winding road and small villages had her turning onto a highway, headed south, and soon enough the well-lit, busy little town of Tenterfield and her booked motel room ended the first day of her road trip.
Clair stepped from the car at the motel reception. The air was different. The town was 1000 metres above sea level, and though icy cold, the air was clean and dry. It was thinner than her lungs were used to. It was crisp and sharp with sound: Her car door snapped shut. The rattle of a passing livestock truck was amplified as if Clair was listening to it through headphones. By the ocean the air was thick with sea-spray and salt that dampened sound.
“Hi, I’m Clair Wells. I have a reservation,” Clair announced.
A thin, grey-haired man in a heavy woollen jumper took her details and gave her a key and breakfast menu. She parked by her room and decided to shower before she ate. She warmed and freshened up then drove back into the town centre and found a café.
It was nothing for Clair to eat alone. It was nothing for her to drive across the country alone, to live alone, to be alone.
Clair’s earliest clear memories were of starting a new school at age eight. Her first school and life before that age were stored in her mind as impressions and sentiments rather than actual recollections. She had been a strong, independent child at eight and had no problem starting a new school in Brisbane. Her parents had moved there with Clair and her younger brother and sister. Her father had taken work as a marine mechanic. He had previously worked on fishing trawlers and changed up to luxury yachts and cabin cruisers.
Clair had little affinity with her father and little more with her mother or brother and sister. She loved them and they loved her, but they never really talked—never about anything meaningful.
At eight years of age, Clair would walk to her new school alone. And she would sit alone at recess and lunch. And at high school she would spend her breaks at the library, reading alone.
She was actually quite personable, though. She got on well at work and with her teachers through school and at college. She got along with her neighbours, her clients, her numerous boyfriends and their friends and families, with everyone from bus drivers to telemarketers on the phone.
Clair got on well with everyone but needed no one. She had no real friends—none she had ever confided anything to. She didn’t need to confide anything because she had everything under control, and when she would stop thinking and just feel the loneliness in her life, she would deal with that alone too. She might spend a day in her dressing gown sometimes, maybe crying a little, but she would always power through.
It suited Clair entirely to lie there staring up at the ceiling of a strange motel room that night, a long way from home and with everything she ever needed in herself and something to stimulate her mind.
She sat up and turned the light back on. Her Mulvane folder was tucked under her clothes in her bag, and she pulled it out and opened it. She flicked through to the news article print-out of Charles Mulvane’s elder brother having been reported missing. With the man, Charles, there had been a body. In the case of the elder brother, the article only reported he was missing.
Clair checked the date and timeline. The elder brother had been reported missing several months after the younger brother’s death. She wondered if he had ever turned up, alive or dead. She had only just found the article about him and decided she needed to look into what happened to the guy.
She slept well in the strange, slightly firm bed with weird white cotton sheets and heavy blankets. She was used to a light feather quilt and a bit more freedom to toss and turn.
She remained cuddled up against the cold rather late then meandered through a local paper as she ate a continental breakfast in the motel restaurant. The proprietors were a middle-aged couple—the thin man from the previous evening and his short, stocky wife. They were friendly and chatty.
“The range runs the length of the country near enough,” the man was saying. “Runs all the way from Cape York in the tropics to the alps in New South Wales and Victoria. Right here you’re close to the middle.”
“Rubbish, Fred. We’re a long way south of the middle,” the woman cut in, topping up Clair’s tea.
“Well, yeah, I guess. But there’s still over a thousand kilometres the way she’s headed. And a lot of it’s windy roads. Where’s your next booking?”
“Lithgow,” Clair answered. “Is that too far?”
“Snowed in Lithgow last night,” the woman, Vera, offered.
“And Katoomba and Orange—all through there,” Fred concurred with his wife. “It’s higher up than that not far along here, though. Don’t get much snow this far north, but the range is up in the clouds here in New England.”
“It’s a tableland here, though,” Vera added. “You don’t go back down. The whole area is up in the clouds. Not like down around Lithgow and Katoomba where you’re up and down mountains.”
“Or further south in the real snow country,” Fred chimed in, siding with his wife and supporting her, Clair noticed with amusement. “Down around the capital, you’re up in the clouds and then there’s a mountain as well. Up in the bloody heavens!”
Clair bade the nice couple goodbye and cranked the heater dial all the way up in her hire-car. There was a heavy frost on the grass and fence-posts and a swirling fog that was indeed a cloud lumbering across the ground. Sheep grazed brown winter grass in the gently rolling fields, which were littered with outcrops of granite in the form of smooth, round boulders. The country was fairly level, although there were stark treeless bluffs of rock that towered over the road, up to another two hundred metres above sea-level.
The towns of the New England Tableland were a blend of historic and modern architecture. They gave the impression of pride in the history of the area mingled with the practica
lities of modern agriculture and twenty-first century living standards.
After visiting the grave of the legendary bushranger Captain Thunderbolt, Clair pulled into a Hungry Jack’s drive thru for lunch. She then took a turn-off to a lookout and pulled up beside a little old car where she waved and nodded to a young aboriginal girl breastfeeding a baby. The girl was otherwise alone, it seemed. She was sitting in the passenger seat, but there was nothing around and no one else in sight.
The lookout was a bare gravel parking area with a single rail timber fence around a sheer cliff’s edge. The cold air swept upward to consume Clair as she stood there shivering and gazing out at the western slopes of the range and distant farmland that rolled into the horizon hundreds of kilometres away.
She had spent the hours that morning on top of the range and was about to wind her way back down to Earth. She would be tipping off the western side of the range, though. The coastal fringe of the continent got awfully busy to the south of New England. The major ports and cities of Newcastle and Wollongong were to the north and south of the sprawling international city of Sydney. Clair’s travel map had a line marked that took her to the west of the ranges and avoided all of that completely. They were smaller roads she had marked out, but that was fine. She was in no hurry and was happy with her road trip adventure so far.
The young girl was trying to start her car. It was grinding and not firing up at all. The grinding sound slowed, became an alarming clacking sound, then gave out completely. The girl sought a mobile phone but slammed it back down, swearing.
Clair stood by her window until she was acknowledged. “Are you okay?”
The girl was sobbing a little. “Do you have a phone?”
Clair retrieved her phone from her car. It had no service.
“Can I call someone from the next town for you? Or I could give you a lift?”
“Would you?” The girl smiled through her tears. “That would be so great.”
“I’m driving toward Tamworth, and then I turn off the highway, I think.”
“Oh, well, Tamworth will be great.” The girl had perked up. “My dad can pick me up there.”
“Oh, okay…” Clair glanced at the infant she held close. “What about your baby?”
“I know. Can we put her seat in your car? I’ve only got our bag.”
The girl’s name was Isabel. She was thin, dark skinned and pretty with her big brown eyes. She had taken charge, giving Clair her baby girl to hold while she figured out how to attach the child seat in the back of the hire-car. There was a fixture there and it clipped right in.
“What about your car?” Clair asked when they were set to drive away.
“It’s not mine. It’s my boyfriend’s. He can come and get it,” Isabel returned disinterestedly.
She had split with her boyfriend, taking his car and heading home to her parents. She gave Clair the run-down on how the guy had promised to take care of her and their child but was just too immature. He was apparently only eighteen and more concerned with his rugby league and hanging out with his mates than being a family man.
Isabel struck Clair as quite level-headed and mature for a girl of seventeen. The car breakdown had thrown her a little, but she otherwise seemed quite capable and organized. She directed Clair to a motel in Tamworth and thanked her for her help. She would call her father once settled in.
“What about the seat?” Clair called to her as she waved back from the motel office.
“Can you leave it at Red Cross, please? That’s where I got it, and my old one’s in Dad’s car.”
“Oh, okay,” Clair called to her. “Good luck!”
It had been an interesting twenty minute distraction from Clair’s quiet road trip. It had been like a blast of energy shooting through her comfortable solitude.
Her solitude was back, though, as she found the open road on the other side of the large country town of Tamworth. It was back, but she now had a child seat, and seeing it there in her rear-view mirror gave her a slightly bizarre feeling that she couldn’t quite fathom. She would find a Red Cross or St Vincent DePaul collection bin somewhere and drop it off.
Meantime, she wound her way down the western edge of the range and travelled for several hours through a gradually flattening landscape of rolling dry-grass and lightly timbered fields. She had broached the edge of a vast continental interior with the red earth plains sweeping west toward the outback and desert.
Clair’s highlighted line on her road map had her clinging to the fringe of the Great Dividing Range. It took her through more quaint, little towns with history and tradition still shaping the architecture while the twenty-first century claimed the shop-fronts and signage.
By late afternoon she had reached the main highway out of Sydney. She was then only a hundred kilometres from the great city. Her booked motel was flashing on her GPS screen.
“Do you serve dinner here?” Clair asked of the woman who was checking her in.
There was a small restaurant within the motel. Clair showered and presented herself quite hungry. It was a cosy, little room with only six tables. There was a fire place crackling away and emitting a gloriously bone-soothing warmth.
“Bloody freezing out, isn’t it?” the only other customer said to her. It was a guy about Clair’s age.
“Yep,” she answered, backing up to the fire. “This is nice, though.”
He looked her up and down fairly blatantly. She was dressed in jeans and a heavy woollen jumper and hadn’t made her face up or anything. Her hair was still wet from the shower.
She didn’t look away. He had a square jaw and strong, dark features. He was clean shaven. His build was athletic, and his eyes were kindly in spite of their confidence.
Clair decided he was a sales-rep, probably pushing some sort of insurance. He had a wife and young children but spent a lot of time on the road.
“Are you eating alone?” She motioned to the vacant chair opposite his.
“Yes! Join me, please?”
“I’m Candy,” Clair offered with her hand.
“Josh,” the guy replied, half standing and accepting her handshake.
He had a huge hand.
The woman from reception came in from the adjoining kitchen and took their orders. An elderly couple wandered in and warmed by the fire before taking a seat near it and nodding a hello.
“So, what do you do, Josh? Insurance?” Clair asked with a smile.
He chuckled. “Do I look like an insurance peddler?”
“Just a bit,” Clair pressed.
“I see.” He nodded. “I actually peddle livestock medications.”
“Oh. Well, that’s nicer than insurance—helping sick animals.”
“I think so,” the guy agreed. “And how about you, Clair? What do you peddle?”
Clair laughed. “Well… Um… I guess I peddle fantasies.”
“Fantasies! Really?”
There was a mixture of curiosity and dare in the look Clair was getting.
Should she elaborate? She was not the least embarrassed by stripping for a living, but it would be fun to keep the guy guessing.
“Men’s fantasies to be more specific, but that’s all you’re getting, stranger.”
He laughed. “Fine! That’s plenty, anyway!”
Clair made a funny face. She liked this guy. She always judged people quickly and was rarely wrong.
“So, what are you doing in Lithgow?” he went on. “Which way are you headed?”
“I’m only passing through—south. I’m on a road trip to a little town in Victoria where there’s an unsolved murder from years ago… I’m studying criminology at college.”
“Oh, right… That sounds cool. And you have to investigate and—?”
“And do a paper. Kind of explain how the original investigation was done and where it’s up to—why it’s still an unsolved crime.”
“Oh, okay. Yeah, that’s really cool. So, who was murdered?”
“Some rich guy and maybe his
brother. I’ve only got a few news clippings so far.”
“Rich guy, eh? It was probably the butler. Or the widow!”
“Well, there is a widow,” Clair suggested secretively.
Their soup had arrived.
“So, you’re away from home on one of your sales trips?” Clair asked her companion.
“Yeah, I wish. I’m going to help my mum set up some stupid flower stall or something.”
Clair’s interest piqued. “A flower stall?”
“Yeah. There’s some sort of show. Like, for weddings and whatever. I don’t know much about it—just that the woman who works with Mum is sick, and I got roped in to help set up… It’s down in Moss Vale. I’m from out at Broken Hill. I’ve been driving all day and will have to be on the road at five. I think it’s about three hours to Moss Vale. Depends on the Sydney traffic.”
“Yeah, I’m avoiding Sydney,” Clair said pointedly. “I’m sort of following the mountains down to Canberra then across to the coast.”
The guy concurred, and they compared plans for avoiding the city as best they each could. It turned out Clair was to be passing close to Moss Vale, anyway, and she agreed she might stop by the flower show if she saw a sign for it on the highway. Her dinner companion couldn’t tell her how to find it exactly, as he had not yet done so himself.
They parted company after the meal, and Clair found sleep quickly. She woke early the next morning and was underway by six. The road was tinged in frost, and the fog was thick as she climbed back up to the top of the range.
She stopped at the Three Sisters lookout and took her camera over to the cliff’s edge to snap some pictures. The Three Sisters were massive pillars of rock jutting up from the floor of a great depression in the world. There were mountain rims and stark, treed monuments in the distance. There was a tremendous upheaval of earth and deep crevices scarring the land. The icy air was thin and crisp with a dew-touched waft of eucalyptus. The scene before Clair was a gigantic amphitheatre before a sweeping horizon of mountains stretching hundreds of kilometres into the hazy blue distance.
After buying a coffee at a stall, she was back on the road—a winding thoroughfare chiselled out in the early 1800s by pioneers, Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth. They had driven a bullock team from the convict settlement of Sydney and surveyed the crossing of the Great Dividing Range. It had since been turned into a slick, four lane expressway with the names of the pioneers labelling three boutique towns before the road plunged down toward the suburbs of the city.