The Other Side of Beautiful

by Kim Lock

  Now she’d flooded the engine. It coughed and stopped, filling the air with the fumes of unburned fuel.

  The figure continued, his stride slow but purposeful.

  Mercy’s fear turned to a cold rage. ‘I will not go down like this,’ she cried. ‘After everything, I will not see it end this way! Start, now!’

  The engine turned over, spluttered, and came to life. She shoved at the gear stick, hauled on the steering wheel and roared back onto the highway, gravel skittering and the man standing silently in her wake.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  With the dawn of the following morning came, of course, feelings of doubt. Even a sense of silliness. Shaken, Mercy had fled back to Elliot, each kilometre feeling like a hundred, each minute stretching like an hour, her eyes glued to the rear-vision mirror as she waited for a row of bright spotlights to bear down on her little van and shotgun pellets to shatter the back window.

  None of that happened. The only thing that had happened after Mercy fled the rest area and peeled into the Elliot caravan park was she had pulled into a campsite—a scrappy patch of grass under a tree, as far away as possible from the dark, hulking shape of Ann Barker’s RV—and then she’d tucked the cat throw over her head and quivered until the sun came up.

  So, as Mercy lay now in the balmy sub-tropical morning, listening to the trumpeting of peacocks strutting around outside the van, the threat of the previous night felt surreal, something she had entirely imagined. The man was probably only walking towards the Hijet to offer assistance in getting it to start. That is, if he was even walking towards her at all. Maybe he was just walking to the toilet?

  Naturally, she was also kicking herself for choosing the very real threat of facing the opinion writer who had called her a murderer over the imagined threat of a single man at a rest stop.

  But when she considered it that way, even Ann fucking Barker won out. Because if Mercy had died last night, as she had at the time been entirely convinced she was going to, people like Barker would have positively crowed all over the internet about how much of an idiot Mercy was for putting herself into that situation in the first place. A deserted rest area, at night, in the far reaches of the Territory outback? It was the road-trip equivalent of walking home alone in the dark with her earphones in—they would have said Mercy was asking for it.

  ‘But this is what we do, isn’t it?’ she said to herself, pushing down the cat blanket and letting Wasabi lick her hand. She couldn’t escape the collective female conditioning that ensured she be fearful of everything—her environment, her male counterparts, her body hair—but then, on top of that, to feel ashamed and silly for being afraid of everything.

  Groaning, Mercy rolled onto her front, stuffing her face into the mattress. She had already decided she’d simply wait in the van until Ann Barker’s RV left. After all, a few weatherboard shacks and herds of peacocks surrounded by rusted car bodies and shoulder-high spear grass would hold very little appeal for two teenage girls—especially without any internet or phone service. They would be gone very soon.

  Along with Mercy’s Hijet and Ann’s RV, there were only two other campers in the park: a pair of grey nomads in caravans, both of whom roared out predictably not long after the crack of dawn. Inside her van, Mercy stayed low, lifting her eyes above the window frame, watching the luxury RV on the far side of the park and waiting for it to leave, but by the time nine am rolled past, Mercy was busting for the facilities and there was no sign of the RV going anywhere. In fact, there was no sign of life from Ann Barker’s RV at all. No chairs or tables unfolded for breakfast outside, no movement through the windows, all the curtains were drawn.

  As the sun rose higher, the inside of the van began to swelter. Reluctantly, Mercy rolled down the windows, eyeing the lurking RV, but without any breeze there was little relief. Last night’s downpour was swiftly turning into this morning’s sauna.

  After making coffee and eating an apple and a few slices of cheese, Mercy couldn’t hold out any longer. Neither could Wasabi: his whines had grown squeakier and more urgent. For a long minute she studied the silent RV, and after convincing herself that Ann and her family were either still sound asleep or had gone for some kind of inexplicably lengthy morning walk around the unglamorous facilities of Elliot, Mercy cracked open the back door and slipped out.

  Eyes low, she hurried across the grass. Bull-ants swarmed over patches of damp sand, causing her to take large, jolting steps that strained her full bladder. Wasabi trotted in circles, sneezing at the ants, panting after the peacocks and availing himself of more than one tree. When he wandered in the direction of the monstrous RV, she hissed at him, glancing anxiously at the windows, but the vehicle remained quiet.

  The amenities block was a small brick building painted bright blue. Inside, Mercy locked herself and the dog in a shower stall and stood under an invigorating stream of cool water. As soon as she finished her shower, she would leave. All she had to do was dress herself, return to the van and drive away. Even if she ran into Ann, she told herself as she scrubbed her face, Mercy was under no obligation to speak to her. Who did the woman think she was? Mercy thought now, soaping under her arms. The writer was just a mouthpiece for clicks. Mercy owed her nothing.

  Emboldened, she shut off the water. She towelled her newly cropped hair. She stepped into her shorts, pulled on her T-shirt and opened the stall door as Ann Barker turned from the sink and gave her a smile.

  ‘Doctor Blain,’ the opinion writer said around the toothbrush in her mouth. ‘Good morning.’ Ann spat toothpaste into the sink. ‘I thought that was your funny little van outside. Obviously you had no trouble after it was fixed? I didn’t even see you leave, back at Ti Tree.’

  Mercy was clean, dry and dressed. All she had to do was say, Excuse me, and slip past Ann, get into her van and drive away. She owed Ann nothing, right? But as the writer stood there with a smile, those piercing grey eyes bright, head tilted, wiping toothpaste from her chin and smelling of shampoo and bold self-entitlement, all the resolve Mercy had found in the shower only moments ago vanished. Before Mercy’s eyes all the comments came racking up, unfiltered and into the hundreds, bursting with high drama. One comment had even read, Fuck that! Fuck her! BURN THEM ALL.

  And how Mercy had burned indeed.

  ‘How are you enjoying your trip?’ Ann asked, picking up a tube of sunscreen. ‘It’s starting to feel a little tropical, wouldn’t you say?’ She tilted her head, narrowing her eyes. ‘I’d swear your hair looks shorter. Anyway, we’re going to make straight for Darwin today, I don’t care if we have to drive into the night. Without phone service, we’re all going a bit mad.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mercy heard herself say. ‘God forbid you’re not stoking public outrage about something.’

  Ann paused, a dob of sunscreen in her palm. ‘What?’

  And then it was coming out of Mercy’s mouth. It was coming out all by itself, as if it had two thousand kilometres of velocity behind it, a continent of flames, and it seemed all Mercy could do was bear witness to it. ‘You called me a murderer, if I recall. Admittedly I only read the article once, but I don’t think being called that is something I could have misread.’

  Slowly, Ann set the tube of sunscreen down. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mercy’s mouth was dry. ‘You did.’

  ‘Look,’ Ann said, rubbing cream into her upper arm, ‘since I ran into you a couple of days ago, I’ve been trying to remember the case. But I know people were up in arms about it, that much I do recall, and I remember thinking that was remarkable in itself, because, by and large, doctors are immune from public criticism.’ She squeezed more sunscreen into her palm. The beachy scent of it filled the steamy brick building. ‘I mean, why wouldn’t you guys be? You save lives. You’re miracle workers.’ She bent forward to wipe sunscreen on her thighs, looking up at Mercy from under loose, swinging curls. ‘So what was different, this time? And then.’ She straightened up. ‘Then I remembered who she was. That influencer. How m
any Instagram followers did she have? A million?’

  A beat of silence passed, the sound of Wasabi’s panting echoing around the brick building.

  ‘One-point-three million,’ Mercy said at length. ‘And her husband had about half that.’

  Another silence ensued. The tap dripped in the sink.

  Then Ann slapped her palms together. ‘Well,’ she said briskly. ‘There you go.’ She shrugged. ‘People knew who they were. Her followers had shared every moment of that pregnancy—photos of her stretch marks, her maternity knickers, the beautiful nursery. And then she died and, as usual, there had to be a scapegoat.’

  Was it because Ann used that word, scapegoat? When Mercy was growing up, she had often felt as though her mother had created her just so she would have someone to blame. Mercy never had any choice in the fact that she existed, that she was Loretta Blain’s child, living in her mother’s house by her mother’s say-so. Mercy’s mother made her, so when she had insisted Mercy be the person she wanted her to be—which Mercy never could be, of course—it felt devastating and hypocritical. Why did her mother resent Mercy’s existence when she had chosen to make her exist in the first place? How come, no matter how much you tried your best, some people would choose your very existence to tear down in order to make themselves feel bigger?

  The back of Mercy’s throat began to ache; hot tears swam into her eyes.

  ‘You had no right to put her family through that.’

  Ann looked surprised. ‘Me? All I did was report the facts. A bit of a flurry online? That’s nothing compared to the grief of losing a loved one.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Mercy said, anger flaring. ‘Nothing compares to losing a loved one. Nothing. And that “bit of a flurry online”—which you instigated, by the way—was the soundtrack for me at a time when I’d lost not one but two loved ones. Not in the same circumstances as Tamara’s family, but to me, they were still gone. Grief is grief. It’s complicated and awful and hard and it can only be weathered with time. But I couldn’t weather it. I could not. Because I was too busy hiding, keeping my head down, barricading myself against all this confected rage when all I had done was my job. To you, words are nothing but lures for traffic, fodder for advertising revenue. But your words have real-life consequences, Ann, they have a human face. Without any actual understanding of what happened—without a single scrap of empathy or nuance or humanity—you turned that family’s grief, the most awful thing in their life, into nothing but clickbait. To make yourself feel bigger.’

  Mercy’s breath was coming fast and shallow.

  Ann stared at her. She opened her mouth to speak, and then they both turned at the sound of a toilet flushing. The end stall opened and Ann’s teenage daughter stepped out.

  ‘Yeah, Mum,’ the girl muttered. ‘And you lecture me about the consequences of posting online. Jeez.’

  Shaking her head, Ann’s daughter washed her hands and left. Wordlessly, Mercy watched her go. Then she said, ‘Excuse me,’ stepped around Ann Barker and walked outside into the sunshine.

  Maybe, Mercy thought, she had come so far that she had left fear behind and entered apathy. Or even oblivion. Whatever the case, as she filled the Hijet with petrol at the Elliot service station, she could feel her mind reaching out, searching for the reliable old hit of fear like an addict for the pipe, only to find a sense of … nothing. What actually was this? Who was plumbing the depths of her mind, looking for anxiety, or regret, or angst, and coming up empty-handed? And what was it that she had instead? Without fear, what did Mercy feel?

  After paying for the petrol, Mercy poured herself a cup of water and stood in the shade at the back of the van to drink it. An ingrained sense of habit wanted to replay those moments with Ann Barker in the amenities block, but bizarrely, she also found that, right now, she genuinely did not care. Ann Barker’s RV had gone and the opinion writer was in the past, and Mercy was here, now, drinking cool water and listening to the insects shriek in the warm red dirt, looking at the blue sky stretching forever.

  Lifting her foot, she rested it on the rear bumper. There was a metallic clunk and her foot skidded onto the gravel. Startled, Mercy turned and saw the bumper hanging at an angle.

  Carefully, she gave the bumper an experimental jiggle. When it didn’t fall off she jiggled harder, but rather than being loose, it now seemed to be wedged in position, sloping like a frown towards the shiny new tailpipe Tate had installed back in Ti Tree.

  In truth, the Hijet was starting to make more noises than it used to. Sometimes it skipped a beat, gave an unusual little burp, barely perceptible but there nonetheless. New rattles had evolved, different squeaks. The rear-vision mirror had begun to sag and the driver’s side window no longer rolled all the way up.

  But, like the old mechanic had assured her, the steering was tight and the van still stopped on a dime. Just yesterday afternoon, Mercy had slammed on the brakes for an echidna waddling across the highway and the Hijet had stopped so swiftly and completely that the tyres had chirped. And the temperature gauge never rose above cool, even in the heat of the mid-afternoon sun. Mercy kept its liquids topped up: petrol and water. The bumper didn’t matter, it was only aesthetic.

  Giving the drooping bumper a final shove, Mercy nodded, satisfied, then drained her cup and got back into the van.

  Only three hundred kilometres up the road, Mercy had been told by the petrol station attendant, was a place she absolutely had to visit. She simply could not miss it.

  After she had laughed about how it was only in the outback of Australia that a distance of three hundred kilometres could carry the sentiment ‘only’—and then fell about over how, for most drivers, three hundred kays was almost a single stretch of driving but for Mercy it was more than half a day, even without stops—the attendant had produced a map and pointed to the Mataranka Thermal Pools.

  ‘Is it a dirt road?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Sealed all the way,’ he’d assured her.

  So, with her ears peeled for the sound of the rear bumper hitting the bitumen, Mercy pulled onto the highway and continued north.

  Gradually, she felt a change in the atmosphere. The air grew stickier, heavier; the heat became more consuming. Three hours north of Elliot, she rolled into the tiny establishment of Larrimah with her T-shirt clinging damply to her sides and her stomach growling. Strung up on a fence was a chalkboard sign reading THE BEST PIES IN TOWN! and although she wanted to get to Mataranka, to immerse her sweating, dusty body in clear thermal waters, Mercy’s hunger pulled her off the highway, only to discover another sign promising THE BEST HOME MADE PIES IN TOWN and now she was stuck for too many choices of pie. But then she saw yet another sign that said YOUR DOG IS WELCOME HERE! and her decision was made.

  The café was a weatherboard-and-shadecloth shack covered by a sprawling pink bougainvillea. Inside, a large-bladed fan squeaked in lazy circles from the ceiling, stirring the warm air like soup. Declining offers of camel or buffalo pies, Mercy chose two beef pies and took them outside, where she sat in the shade of a violently blossoming flame tree and ate, giving the second pie to Wasabi.

  The highway was quiet; the few dirt tracks that comprised the township’s streets were empty, baking red beneath a hard sky. From somewhere nearby came a lonesome, metallic whine, like a windmill shifting in an errant breeze; a skinny dog trotted in the distance and Mercy put her hand on Wasabi’s collar but he was too busy studying his pie, pawing away green-ants and waiting for it to cool.

  Despite the heat, as Mercy ate she felt the hairs on her arms standing on end. Tied to fences, tacked onto power poles and plastered across the facade of the pub across the road were blue-and-white chequered posters. MISSING read the slab headline. When Mercy went back into the café for a lemonade and asked after the missing man, she was met with pursed lips, a shaken head and a dark look. Mercy thought of the man in the pig-dog ute from the previous night, the strident guitar twangs of ‘Stairway To Heaven’ echoing into the outback, the impossible vastness
of the space. How small the human body was, she thought. How small and vulnerable. She looked down at the remains of her pie and felt a wave of loneliness come over her. Abruptly her appetite was gone, along with whatever quietness she had felt earlier at Elliot, replaced by crawling skin and fear skittering up her spine. She picked up the dog, climbed into the van and hurried back onto the highway.

  As the hours passed, the vegetation continued to evolve. Undergrowth thickened, greens intensified. The red of the dirt began to fade, losing the shades of blood it had carried for more than two thousand kilometres. Termite mounds grew taller, as if to keep up with the grass. Open glades of dry gum trees were replaced with forests of whip-thin, fire-charred sticks. The highway crossed over a wide monsoonal floodplain and Mercy’s pulse quickened.

  She had entered the tropical north.

  DARWIN 450.

  It was about three pm when Mercy rolled into Mataranka, a clutch of stores tucked against one side of the highway. Palms waved, bougainvillea frothed purple and an enormous woody frangipani dropped blossoms onto the road and perfumed the sticky air.

  Mercy selected a camping ground based on a sign that said PETS VERY WELCOME! and when she drove in, she found a tree-studded grassy space dotted with picnic tables, wallabies and more peacocks.

  And there, parked under the trees, was Bert’s silver LandCruiser and caravan, and a polite distance away from it, Andy’s rental camper.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  ‘The whole gang’s here!’ Bert said happily, propping his foot up on the Hijet’s back wheel. ‘Although you just missed Pete and Jules. They chuffed off this morning. We decided to stay an extra night, because look at this place.’ He swept out his arm. ‘It’s just magic.

  ‘So listen,’ Bert went on without stopping. ‘Happy hour’s at four, at ours. Silver Cruiser and Jayco Starcraft.’ He pointed, then beamed. ‘But you know that by now! Bring whatever you’ve got, and if you’ve got nothing, bring that. This bumper’s looking a bit average, did you know that?’ Bert frowned at the van’s rear bumper, clinging at an angle over the tailpipe. He bent down and gave it a test wiggle. ‘Anyway,’ he said, straightening up. ‘I’ll take a look at it later. I’ve got a wrench that’d fit those bolts.’ He patted several of his shirt pockets, as if checking for spare wrenches.