The sun filled the sky and had no edges. It was everything over them, white heat pressing down on them and bleaching the blue from the sky. Ford narrowed his eyes so that only a sliver of ground in front of him was visible, orange and white dots dancing on his closed eyelids.
Another hour on and in step behind Kavanagh he noticed that she was limping, dragging her left foot in the gravel, turning it inwards and walking on the edge of her boot, the Cuban heel digging into the sand.
‘How badly are you blistered?’ he asked.
She paused before she spoke. ‘These boots ain’t made for walking.’
Their pace slowed. Ford was walking ahead now, setting a cadence that Kavanagh could keep. Whenever he looked around, her face was set in a grimace of pain. Ford’s feet were also blistered inside his work boots, the steel toe caps crowding his toes. He could feel that his socks were wet, and he suspected that some of it was blood. Kavanagh had her arms folded across her chest, her bare hands tucked under her armpits to keep them out of the sun, her body twisted to keep her face pointed away from it. The sun was tracking slowly west as they made equally slow progress north. The hills looked closer, and the land to the east grew taller and rockier until the river bed narrowed and got deeper, becoming a shallow ravine between the hills. It curved around a promontory and there, beneath the shadow of overhanging rocks, was a pool of water trapped in a narrow defile, bordered by slabs of rock along its sides and a fan of yellow sand at one end. Paperbarks stood along the western side, drooping their ribbon leaves over the pool, the tips almost reaching the water. A white heron rose gracefully from the shadows, startled by their approach, the rush of air under its wings the only sound besides their own breathing.
The sand at the shallow end of the pool was marked with the footprints of birds. The water itself was black, spotted with mosquitos and dead flies, ringed with bird droppings. Kavanagh walked stiff-legged to the shade under the trees and threw herself onto a ledge of rock beside the water. Ford sat beside her and took the cap off his water bottle, shaking it to feel the weight of water remaining and calculating how long it might last. He handed it to her and she sipped it gingerly, eying the black water in the pool from under the brim of her hat.
‘We can’t drink that,’ said Ford, nodding towards hoof prints left by cattle beside their dung. ‘We’re not that desperate, yet.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘but I can wash my feet in it.’ She threw one leg over the other and tried to grab hold of her boot, but her legs were too stiff. She collapsed backwards again and lay flat on her back, one boot in the air, waggling the toe at Ford. He took hold of it and pulled, and the boot came off with a wet sucking sound, revealing Kavanagh’s white sports sock stained red with dust and blood. He put a finger under the top of it and peeled it off and they both sucked air through their teeth when they saw the mess that was her bare foot. Ford leaned in to take a closer look, trying not to grimace at the smell. She had lost the nail from her second toe, and the others were black. The tops of her toes were stripped of skin and bleeding, and the undersides had shreds of skin hanging from burst blisters. Her heel was similarly flayed, the sole ringed with blisters that had bled, and there were deep red welts across the top of her instep. Ford grasped the other boot and found that foot to be in a worse state than the first. Kavanagh looked at her feet in disgust and lay back on the rock, putting her hat over her face.
‘Will I live?’ she said.
‘Most likely,’ said Ford, ‘but your ballet career is fucked.’ He leaned over the ledge and dipped the socks in the water, rinsing them and wringing them out, then turned them inside-out and repeated the process, holding them up to check if he had made them any cleaner.
‘Are we going to get through this?’ asked Kavanagh, her voice small and muffled beneath the hat. A fly licked its way up the line of sweat that had run down her neck, and when it reached her chin she swatted it.
‘We’ll get out of this,’ said Ford. ‘Roth wants us alive, or he’d have burned us in our car.’
She snorted from under the hat. ‘Is this how you are now? Indifferent?’
‘I have no interest in chasing down Roth. He could be on the coast by now, in another plane, or on a boat.’
‘I meant indifferent to death.’
Ford dunked the socks in the water again and balled them, still dripping, in his hand. He sat cross-legged and lifted Kavanagh’s right foot to rest it in his lap, then started to wipe it with the sock. She winced when he brushed across the raw skin.
‘After everything I went through last year, being shot and beaten, I got into the habit of thinking about death,’ he said. ‘I used to think about it every night after I’d put Grace to bed.’
‘You’re worried about her?’
‘She’ll be safer where she is than out here with us.’
‘But she’ll be worrying about you.’
‘She spends a lot of time worrying about me, whether I’m with her or not. She carries a lot of weight on her shoulders for someone so small.’
‘You both do.’
He put her foot gently back on the ground and lifted the other one and started to wash it. ‘Without a sense of death around us, life would be insipid,’ he said. ‘All expectations, all sense of failure or embarrassment, these things fall away when we’re faced with death, leaving only what’s important. I’ve failed my family before and I’ll fail again, but I don’t fear failure now, and I don’t fear death, and I’ll take whatever risk presents itself because to stay static is impossible now.’
He put her foot down and picked up the two canteens of water. He poured the contents of one into the other and then hefted it for weight. It was less than half full. Reaching down to the edge of the water, he scooped up a handful of sand, and put it into one of Kavanagh’s socks, repeating the process until it was full and bulging. He took one of her boots and dunked it in the pool, filled it to the brim with water, then tipped it into the top of the sock, which he held over the empty canteen. Water dripped slowly from the sock into the bottle.
‘It’s a filter, of sorts,’ he said. ‘Better than drinking this stuff straight out of the pool. There may come a time we’ll be grateful for it.’
When the canteen was full Ford emptied the sand from the sock, rinsed both socks again and wrung them out, then stood up and walked out into the sun. He laid the socks on a flat rock to dry, watching as the sun evaporated the spilled water around them, the dark spots on the rock shrinking then disappearing. When he returned Kavanagh was asleep, her breathing laboured. He wondered if she had listened to what he had said. He lay down beside her, closed his eyes, and let unconsciousness overtake him.
When he awoke the sun was low in the west, a hand’s breadth above the hills that lined the horizon. Kavanagh was standing close by in the sand by the pool, her boots folded over the top of her water canteen, trapped between the straps. She was barefoot, stepping from one foot to the other, testing the pain. ‘The sand’s not so hot now,’ she said. ‘If we keep away from the rocks I’ll be better without boots.’ Her face was flushed red, her eyes seemed unfocused, and Ford recognised the symptoms of heat stress. He drank from his own canteen and looked at his watch. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
The sun was not as hot, but the humidity had increased, and Ford’s shirt was soon wet again. He could see the moon now in the east, hanging low over the plain, waxing gibbous, glowing an ugly yellow, veiled by the dust in the air. It gave him some comfort that they would have light to walk by when the sun was gone.
The sun was soon touching the hills, painting them the colour of dried blood. Ford’s face was brushed by a breeze, barely discernible, a last sigh from the desert. The twilight was brief, a haunting glow high in the sky before the stars appeared and the gloom closed in around them, dark shadows creeping towards them from the rocks.
Kavanagh stumbled in the dark, swore under her breath, but kept moving. In the silence of the bush he could hear her crying, a small, thin noise not much louder t
han her breathing. He caught up with her, put a hand on her shoulder to stop her, then made her put on his socks. His boots were too large for her, and she declined them with a stubborn shake of her head, so he put them on again over his bare feet. He took her hand and walked ahead of her, leading her along the river bed in the blue light from the moon, finding the softest path for her.
It was another hour before the bed widened, the shadows of paperbarks looming at them from the dark. As they walked through the trees, they found themselves in a broad clearing, walking on smooth sand that was firm under foot and seemed to glow in the moonlight.
Ford let go of Kavanagh’s hand and squatted down, brushing the thin layer of sand aside to feel the hard flat ground beneath, a ribbon of concrete crossing the river bed. ‘It’s a road,’ he said, relief pulsing through him. ‘It’s a ford across the river.’
Kavanagh groaned and slumped to the ground, curling up on her side, pulling her knees to her chest, whimpering louder now. He didn’t need to ask her to go on. They would wait for daylight or hope for a car. He made her raise her head and drink, the water in her canteen down to the last few mouthfuls, then he let her sleep. He lay down and wrapped himself around her, pressing his nose to the nape of her neck, feeling the heat radiate from her skin, and his mind filled with thoughts of his daughter until he fell asleep on the road.
TWENTY-ONE
The sound of the engine woke him, a high-pitched whine broken by grinding gear changes and the rasp of a perforated exhaust. He sat upright and for a moment thought the noise was something from his dreams, but it reached him again, distant but distinct. He stood up and turned his head to see if he could identify the direction it was coming from but it seemed to be echoing off the rocks. A flash of light in the sky made him look to the east, but all he could see was the moon, higher now, embedded within the sweep of the Milky Way.
Light raced across the hillside and he could hear the vehicle more clearly, labouring around the hill to the east, the beams of its headlights playing on the rocks, until it came around the hill and the two discs of its headlights became visible. The engine note dropped to a throaty rumble and Ford recognised the whine as an old four-wheel-drive gearbox in high ratio. It was still a few kilometres away. He squatted down and nudged Kavanagh but she did not stir and he wondered if she may have been sicker than he had thought and he should not have let her sleep. As the jeep came towards the river the lights illuminated the whole of the crossing, throwing shadows from the gum trees either side of Ford, and showing him the full length of the river crossing, the concrete ribbon only wide enough for one vehicle, with Kavanagh lying in the middle of it.
Ford took his cap off, then stood as upright as he could and stared straight down the road into the approaching headlights. The vehicle slowed when it saw him, crashing down through the gears then crawling forward until it stopped fifty metres away. Ford squinted into the headlights and waved, an awkward flick of his wrist that made him feel embarrassed even as he did it. The engine revved and the car inched forward until it was close. It was an old Land Rover, the headlights close together in the recessed radiator grille. The engine idled roughly and the door swung open. Ford could make out nothing of the driver stepping out but a vague silhouette and the outline of a broad-brimmed hat; as the man turned to face him, he saw a flash of light off his spectacles. He walked slowly into the light and Ford recognised the long grey beard and the skinny legs poking down from the baggy shorts.
Henry Dussell looked down at Kavanagh before he spoke. ‘Bloody foolish place to roll out your swag,’ he said. ‘There’s been idiots fall asleep in the river bed and got swept away when the rains come.’
Ford stepped forward into the light so Dussell could see the state of him, and watched the old man’s eyes widen. ‘We got stranded,’ he said. ‘She’s in a bad way. Heat stress, exhaustion, sunburn, dehydration. We need to get her to town.’
Dussell squatted beside Kavanagh and felt for the pulse at her neck. He put a hand on her forehead and tutted to himself. He stood up and put his hands on his hips and sighed, and Ford noticed the holster on his belt. It was tan leather, cracked with age, dark in places with sweat and oil. The gun in it was an old Webley revolver, the black metal shining in the headlights as if it had been recently oiled.
Dussell took a small pen torch from his pocket and shone it on Kavanagh’s face. He squatted down again and put a thumb to her eye, lifted the lid and shone the torch on her iris. ‘Fuck off,’ she muttered, her voice slurred.
‘How long has she been asleep?’ asked Dussell.
Ford turned his watch to the headlights and read the time; it was past nine. ‘Two hours maybe,’ he said. ‘We were walking in the dark.’
‘Let’s get her in the truck,’ said Dussell. They stood either side of her and bent together, took an arm each and pulled her up, her arms hanging loose across their shoulders. She woke again once they’d got her upright, trying to shrug them off, but her legs buckled and they lifted her into the Land Rover. She sat upright in the back seat and opened her eyes and focused on the two men, giving them a small smile and taking hold of the water bottle Dussell offered her.
‘Sip slowly,’ said Dussell. ‘I’ve an esky in the back with some ice.’ He went to the rear door, took down a small hand towel that hung on a hook from the luggage cage, and dipped it in the melted ice at the bottom of the box. After squeezing it, he walked around to Kavanagh and put the cold towel over her head. ‘Not too long,’ he said to her, ‘you’ll start to get a chill.’ There was an army blanket draped across the seat and Dussell wrapped it around her. She sat still, cocooned, only the tip of her nose visible in the weak light.
Dussell climbed behind the steering wheel, waiting for Ford to take the seat beside him. He threw the truck into gear, let out the clutch and they lurched forward. A battered two-way radio was bolted into the roof, the spiral lead to the handset hanging in front of Ford’s face and swinging around as the truck moved. A handheld GPS unit was fixed to the windscreen with gaffer tape and Dussell shone his torch on it to check their location.
When the Land Rover reached the edge of the river bed and climbed the bank, Ford realised they were heading west and he nudged Dussell’s elbow. ‘We need to get her back to town,’ he said.
Dussell kept his eyes on the road. ‘Where’s your vehicle?’ he asked.
Ford jerked his thumb over his shoulder in a direction he figured was south. Dussell pursed his lips and tutted. ‘You know you should have stayed with your vehicle.’
‘It was on fire,’ said Ford. ‘We needed to get away from it.’
‘You pointed south, where were you down there?’
Ford hesitated, figuring that Dussell knew the country well. He decided his own knowledge of the country wasn’t good enough to be able to lie to him. ‘Corunna Downs,’ he said.
‘You should’ve walked to the homestead,’ said Dussell. It would’ve been quicker than heading north and you’d have gone past windmills.’
‘We were at the old airfield,’ said Ford. ‘We came up the river.’
Dussell shone the torch in Ford’s face and he squinted into the light. ‘There’s some aloe vera cream in the glove box,’ said Dussell. ‘Put some on your neck and ears before they blister.’
‘I can feel them glowing,’ said Ford. He opened the flap in the dashboard and found a curled tube of ointment. He squeezed a slug of white cream into his palm and massaged it into his neck. He felt the soothing cold of it immediately.
‘Who were you running from?’ asked Dussell.
Ford rubbed the cream around his ears and didn’t answer.
‘You work in the mines,’ said Dussell. ‘You know the drill out here. You wouldn’t have left your vehicle unless someone was behind you.’
‘We need to get back to town.’
‘Where’s that little girl of yours?’
‘In Marble Bar.’
‘You didn’t leave her at the Ironclad?’
‘No, she
’s with people. She’s safe. But we need to turn around.’
‘Can’t do that, mate. I’ve got things to do. I can set you back down on the road if you like. She’ll be right in a while. I’ll leave you with water. It’s about fifteen clicks back to town. You can be there before morning.’
‘It’s only thirty minutes out of your way.’
‘Half an hour that I don’t have. You can travel with me. I’ll take you back into town tomorrow morning at sparrow’s fart.’
‘I can’t imagine what happens out here that you’d worry about being late. Everything else round here seems to work on Marble Bar time.’
Dussell looked at Ford, then over his shoulder at Kavanagh wrapped in the blanket. ‘I don’t know what you two are doing wandering around out here, but I don’t like it. Too many strangers in town.’
‘Have you seen the Maori today?’ said Ford.
‘We’re getting to it, aren’t we?’ said Dussell. ‘You two better stay with me, where I can keep an eye on you. Don’t want you doing anything else to get in the way of things.’
Ford looked over his shoulder again at Kavanagh, who looked alert now, sipping at the bottle. ‘You reckon you could walk?’ he said.
Kavanagh shook her head.
‘You’ll stay with me,’ said Dussell. He moved his hand to his hip and opened the flap on his holster, laid his hand on the butt of the Webley.
‘Take it easy, old man,’ said Ford. ‘We’re going nowhere.’
Ford reached for the radio handset on the dashboard and Dussell slapped his hand away.
‘I need to check on my daughter,’ he said.
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