The Other Side of Beautiful

by Kim Lock

  Wasabi jumped from the van to sniff Bert’s shoes, then proceeded to dance around him excitedly, long body curled into a tight semi-circle.

  ‘Good company on a trip like this, dogs,’ Bert said, leaning down to give Wasabi a series of pats that were more like resounding thumps. Wasabi snuffled happily. ‘Although you can’t take them into the national parks.’ Bert said it sternly, and Mercy felt told off. ‘That’s why Jan and I haven’t had a dog for, oh …’ he considered it, scratching his gut, ‘twenty-five years or so now. We used to have a big dog, a black Labrador. Named Charlie. What a scoundrel he was! Broke into the neighbour’s yard and killed all his chooks. I came home from work one day and there was feathers everywhere …’

  Mercy glanced longingly into the the van. Her yoghurt would be getting warm. Could she just climb in and start eating it? What was the etiquette around showing up uninvited in someone’s campsite? Was it like when someone knocks on your door when you’re about to start dinner at home, and you can simply … not answer?

  ‘… show-quality hens, he reckoned …’

  The scent of grilling onions wafted on the breeze and Mercy’s stomach gave a loud growl. Sweat clung to the backs of her knees. She imagined the smooth, cool cream of the yoghurt.

  ‘… five bucks each! A bloody rip-off …’

  Mercy stood rooted to her patch of lawn, vacillating between waiting until Bert had naturally concluded his story and walked away or simply retrieving her strawberry yoghurt and eating it, regardless of how long he continued talking. Eventually even Wasabi grew bored, abandoning her to utilise the facilities of a nearby fence post.

  ‘… and then I said, “You can stuff your own goddamn pillow, mate,” and he—well, g’day!’

  Mercy startled, then flushed hot.

  ‘Hiya.’

  A freshly showered Andrew Macauley appeared. Wet hair, thongs on his feet.

  And, yes, Mercy was into her third unwashed day. She could almost see the waves of stench lifting from her body. Flies darted about her eyes but lifting her arms to shoo them might expose them all to a dangerous biohazard. She recalled the shag carpet of hair on her head with horror.

  ‘How’s your bus going?’ Bert asked. ‘You’re the rental camper, the Toyota, right?’

  ‘Aye, that’s me. And you’re the silver LandCruiser?’

  Bert beamed and inflated.

  Andy turned to Mercy and grinned. ‘How’s it that you managed to beat me here?’

  ‘Magic,’ Mercy said.

  Bert roared with laughter. Red wine sloshed from his pewter mug.

  ‘So happy hour’s at Pete and Jules’s tonight—the Avan—’ Bert pointed towards a caravan in the next row, where Mercy could see a gathering of silver-haired folk on folding chairs around a card table holding three, no, four casks of wine ‘—so it should be an absolute pearler. Those two know how to throw happy hour, let me tell you! We’ll see you kids there?’

  ‘Sounds like fun,’ Andy said.

  Mercy panicked.

  ‘But I was about to invite Mercy here for a walk, if that’s all right?’

  ‘Sure, sure.’ Bert held up his hand, backing away. ‘Far be it for us oldies to get in the way of you young whippersnappers.’ He laughed again, turning to walk away, then called over his shoulder, ‘No need to bring anything—I’ve got a great box of Shiraz.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Andy said.

  ‘A walk?’ Mercy said.

  ‘If you’d like? Thought we might explore the town. It’s Friday night, after all.’

  Mercy swallowed. Wasabi had returned and was rolling onto his back to show the Scottish man his undercarriage, paws flopping. Andy obliged, scratching the dog’s belly. Wasabi squinted in ecstasy.

  Mercy’s mind raced, but three things shouted the loudest: firstly, her unwashed state. Secondly, the strawberry yoghurt she desperately wanted to savour while it was still cold, and thirdly, the disgusting state of her hair.

  The shower won, closely followed by the yoghurt.

  Mercy’s heart was thumping but the words came out as if on their own.

  ‘A walk sounds great. How about you come back in twenty minutes? I just have to, uh …’ She flapped her T-shirt to demonstrate, immediately regretting it.

  ‘Sure,’ Andy said. ‘Looks like it’s going to be a spectacular sunset.’ He smiled and all the saliva disappeared from Mercy’s mouth.

  Mercy walked with Wasabi across the park to the amenities block. She raised her hand to called-out greetings, agreeing that yes, it is a perfect evening for it, and even conceding at one point that yes, this is the good life. Criss-crossing the grassy space were lines of electrical cords, rolled-out green matting, chairs and tables. Awnings unfurled and pop-tops unpopped; everywhere were relaxed limbs, drinks in hand, laughter.

  The median age was somewhere close to seventy.

  The shower block was a timber frame with tin walls and a tin roof. Mercy set her bag on a slatted bench. She picked up her hairbrush and looked in the mirror. What she saw would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so mortifying. She had been speaking to people looking like this? Actual human people, with eyes?

  The top of her hair wasn’t visible in the mirror—it lofted up, beyond the mirror’s boundary. But what she could see was a sweat-matted lump, coated in a layer of red dust. The same red dust that covered her van, and the same red dust that covered her face, except for the sunglasses-shaped pale patch around her eyes. There was even dust across her collar bones and caked in the hollow of her throat.

  Locating her hair tie, she tugged, but it held fast.

  ‘Good god,’ she cried as her scalp burned. Strands pinged and snapped. Eventually, with a tearing sound, the tie wrenched loose, trailing long strings of hair. But, even with the hair tie gone, the bun stayed largely in place. She tried untangling it with her fingers, but that succeeded only in turning her hair from a loose knotted bun into a voluminous greasy halo. After attempting to run the brush through it, she gave up. She had a big enough bottle of conditioner.

  Red dust rained down as she stripped out of her clothes. Chunks of it ticked onto the tiles. She dropped her dirty clothes into the bottom of the shower stall, turned on the water and stepped in. The water was blissfully warm; needles of water pelted her dusty, wind-battered skin and aching muscles. Rivulets of brown ran down her legs and whirled into the drain. Wasabi pressed himself into the corner of the stall, face turned away from the water.

  ‘Soap!’ she said into the spray, closing her eyes as the water sluiced over her face. ‘How good is soap?’

  Shampoo foamed up and plopped onto the wet tiles; handfuls of conditioner disappeared but still her hair stayed somewhere aloft, defying gravity. She stomped soap into her clothes, bending down to scrub them clean with her hands. She rinsed dust from Wasabi’s fur, making him sleek as an otter.

  The water began to feel too hot, so she adjusted the taps. After a moment, she turned the hot down again, adding more cold. But still an uncomfortable burning sensation crept over. Rinsing as much of the conditioner as she could, she shut off the water and stepped out.

  Touching the towel to her legs, she let out a gasp of pain. Her thighs were a strident, hot red. Sitting all day with the sun glaring through the windscreen in her tiny new (used) shorts, the sun had baked her bare skin to a crisp.

  She touched the tops of her thighs, wincing as if her fingertips were razors. Carefully she dried herself and stepped gingerly into her change of clothes: the pink I ♥ SYDNEY T-shirt and grey running shorts. Never in her life had she worn a more comfortable outfit.

  Hurrying back across the park in a cloud of shampoo scent, damp clothes clutched in a ball and thighs pulsing with heat, she waved and greeted and agreed once again, before arriving back at the blessed quiet of her van.

  After laying out her wet clothes to dry on the grass, Mercy gave Wasabi a handful of kibble, then opened the cabinet and lifted out the strawberry yoghurt. The plastic sides of the tub retained a cool hint of the
fridge, but it was fading fast. She peeled off the lid, put it to her mouth and licked it clean. Velvety sweet cream melted on her tongue. She dipped in her spoon and brought up a piece of soft strawberry flesh. Her skin tingled. Never in her life had she tasted anything more delicious.

  She was sitting on the bed savouring the last sugary spoonful when she heard Andy’s voice.

  ‘Anyone home?’ Knuckles rapped lightly on the door pillar and his head appeared. ‘Got all the dust off then, I see.’

  Mercy flushed beyond her sunburned thighs. ‘I think I was wearing half the outback,’ she said, wiping her spoon with her towel. ‘The other half is inside the van.’

  When she climbed out, Andy noticed her legs.

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘It’s not too bad,’ she lied, clipping Wasabi to his lead. He spun in excited circles. ‘But I might just stop at the store and see if they have aloe vera ointment. Or some new skin.’

  She could feel her pulse ticking as they walked through the park. Each step that took her further away from the safety and privacy of her van felt like leaving home. She knew a rattly old camper wasn’t really safe, nor was it private, but so far it had kept her cocooned. She thought of the roadtrain belting past her on the highway, the little Daihatsu valiantly shepherding her and Wasabi—and the cremated remains of Jenny Cleggett—to safety.

  Andy offered to watch the dog while Mercy entered the store, but the idea of it made her fingers tighten on the lead.

  ‘It’s okay, I’ll just … take him inside.’

  ‘You sure? I don’t mind.’ He reached down to scratch under Wasabi’s collar.

  ‘He’s … an assistance dog.’

  ‘That’s cool.’ Andy slung his hands in his pockets.

  ‘Emotional assistance. I have … emotions.’

  ‘That’s fine. I’ll just wait here.’ He smiled and Mercy’s thighs sang with heat.

  Inside the store, Wasabi’s claws ticked on the lino. She swallowed nervously but told herself that surely a roadhouse/store/bar in the middle of the outback had seen far more threatening things than a sausage dog on a lead.

  Mercy made a hurried scan of the shelves. There was sunscreen (she already had a tube that she’d forgotten to apply but she grabbed another, anyway), toothpaste, deodorant, generic brand moisturiser, but no aloe vera ointment. She found a bottle of ‘after-sun gel’, a gelatinous, vivid blue mixture in a clear tube. The ingredients were a list of multisyllable chemical equations with a ten-year shelf life. It probably shouldn’t be applied to healthy parts of her body, let alone skin so severely burned little blisters were beginning to appear. But she had no other choice. The label on the front promised a ‘cooling effect’ and she couldn’t deny that cooling was precisely what her poor legs needed.

  Glancing out the window, she saw Andy sitting on a picnic bench, leaning back on his elbows, legs stretched out. The tube of after-sun lotion squelched. She hurried to the counter.

  ‘He’s an assistance dog,’ Mercy said hastily, when she had to tug Wasabi away from the display of potato crisps.

  But the cashier just shrugged and said, ‘Twenty-nine fifty,’ which was at least a two hundred per cent increase on what the gel would retail for a thousand kilometres ago.

  Once again outside the store, Mercy squirted a handful of gel into her palm.

  ‘It looks like the stuff an ice pack is made of,’ Andy observed. ‘You know, the packs you put on your ankle when you sprain it. The stuff that says “Poison, do not eat”.’

  Carefully, barely making contact with her skin, Mercy slicked the gel onto her burned thighs. It felt gooey and icy cold, and the effect was immediate.

  She let out a relieved laugh.

  ‘That’s better than the shower.’ Thighs glistening, Scottish tourist laughing alongside her, Mercy set off on her walk around Marla.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Six minutes later, Mercy said, ‘I think this is it.’ The narrow strip of bitumen crumbled to a halt. Red dirt stretched to the horizon.

  Town, it turned out, was a narrow grid of four streets surrounding weatherboard cabins, dusty lots and barking dogs. A runty police station, a parched oval. Mercy imagined how it would look from high above, this tiny town dropped onto the outback: a sandy patch on a blanket of red.

  ‘It’s pretty incredible,’ Andy said, gazing out over the bush. The setting sun made long shadows and stars were beginning to show in a pink sky. ‘I’d no idea it was going to look like this. It’s the middle of nowhere but it’s that … nowhere-ness itself that feels huge. Like, huger than if you were in the middle of the city.’

  For a moment Mercy couldn’t speak. She knew exactly what he meant. As they stood at the road’s end, the rocky scarlet earth stretching flat as a board, as far as they could see, it was as though they stood in the centre of a vast, breathing space. A heart in the stillness between beats. A lung between breaths. Out here, in the absence of stuff, there was an immense, deeply silent, very real presence.

  Sweat trickled down Mercy’s spine, snapping her out of her reverie.

  ‘We should probably get back,’ she said, tugging Wasabi to heel.

  They turned to walk back, and now that each step took her closer to the van, Mercy began to relax. Their footfalls crunched and Wasabi panted, collar jingling.

  ‘So you’re from Adelaide?’ Andy asked.

  Mercy hesitated. ‘I wasn’t born there, but yes. That’s where I … live.’ Lived, she thought. Her house was a charred ruin. She glanced at him. ‘You?’

  ‘Glasgow.’ He stooped to pick up a pebble. ‘Or just outside it, a wee farming village.’ He threw the pebble in a straight line, down the centre of the deserted street. ‘So where were you born then, if not Adelaide?’

  He was looking at her openly, kindly. It was nothing more than the polite getting-to-know-you small talk people engaged in every day; she didn’t have to answer the question if she didn’t want to.

  But something in her wanted to.

  She cleared her throat. ‘South of Adelaide. A town on the river called Murray Bridge.’

  He picked up another pebble. This one he handed to her, then he selected another for himself.

  ‘I moved to Adelaide to go to uni,’ she found herself saying. ‘Straight out of high school. I wasn’t even nineteen.’

  ‘What’d you study?’

  Mercy turned the warm stone over in her hand. Even before it had all come undone, his was a question she rarely answered—outside of work, to strangers—with honesty. It was too much of a conversation stopper; it inevitably introduced a divide between her and the other person. Telling people she’d studied medicine meant she became an authority figure, an immediate confidante. She would be treated to questions about ingrown toenails, or this itchy patch on their left butt cheek, or their cousin’s prostate cancer treatment—whether or not she was practised in those things. The moment someone knew what Mercy did she became not a normal flawed person but someone infallible. Someone more than. Someone with the answers to life’s grievances. When the truth was she was just as messy and breakable as everyone else.

  ‘Medicine.’

  ‘You’re a doctor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you should know better than to go without sunscreen.’

  She laughed and tried to throw the stone the way Andy had, straight down the road. It slanted to the left, plummeting immediately into the dust.

  ‘What d’you call that shite?’ He handed her another stone.

  ‘Should we really be roaming the streets at twilight throwing rocks?’

  He took her hand, looking down at the stone in her palm. ‘I don’t know about you Aussies, but back home we wouldn’t call that a rock. It’s barely a wee pebble.’

  His fingers left a lingering warmth on hers. Mercy tried again; the rock sailed a few metres and fell.

  ‘So what’s a doctor doing driving an old Japanese import across the country?’

  ‘What’s a Glaswegian doing driving a re
ntal whatever-yours-is across a foreign country?’

  ‘All right.’ He whipped the pebble, low and quick, and it skittered over the asphalt. ‘Shall we count to three and answer at the same time?’

  Andy counted to three, but when neither of them answered, each just looking expectantly at the other, they laughed again.

  As the sun slipped below the horizon the air temperature dropped, but heat continued to radiate from the baked earth. Wasabi’s panting and the sound of their footsteps carried into the night air. They arrived back at the caravan park to the sizzle of grilling meats, the smoke of mosquito coils, chimes of laughter. Wine glasses and coiffed silver hair.

  ‘Is this what they call “glamping”?’ Mercy wondered.

  ‘I think this is what they call “spending the kids’ inheritance”,’ Andy said. ‘Listen.’ He turned to her. ‘I’ve a can of beef stew I’m willing to share. How’d you fancy joining me?’

  Mercy paused. She thought of her freeze-dried rice, tucked alongside the box of Jenny Cleggett. She formed the words to turn him down. But when she opened her mouth to decline, she realised that beef stew sounded good. And in spite of her anxious pulse and scorched thighs, she had enjoyed her walk with the Scottish man. Something about his company felt easy, unpressured. How long had it been since she had laughed with another person?

  ‘Yours or mine?’

  ‘You choose,’ he said. ‘Although if it helps, my gaff has more room for your head. And two burners on the stove.’

  ‘Okay,’ she heard herself agree. ‘I’ll bring the rice.’

  ‘“Chunky Beef and Meat stew”?’ Mercy asked. ‘What kind of meat if it isn’t beef, exactly?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Andy said, studying the can of stew. It was twice the size of a normal can, the label a riot of aggressive colours and slabbed print: chunky and meaty and man-sized.