The Other Side of Beautiful

by Kim Lock

  ‘Have they really moved up the inquest?’ She knew the answer; she’d seen the emailed confirmation from the solicitor.

  ‘Yes. To Monday.’

  ‘Can they even do that? That date’s been fixed for months—’

  ‘Looks like it. Something about a surgery the coroner needs to have. Doesn’t matter. All the submissions were already prepared weeks ago, everyone’s briefed and evidently no one batted an eyelid that the key fucking witness had gone AWOL in the fucking outback, Mercy.’

  Mercy had never heard Eugene—kindly, docile, unflappable, ED senior consultant Eugene—say fuck so many times in one sentence. What could she do? Legal bureaucracy was a machine that churned as unstoppably as a steam engine. Despite anyone’s agoraphobic tendencies, it would roll inexorably forward.

  The inquest into the death of Tamara Lee Spencer was not in two more weeks. Mercy did not have two weeks to collect herself, to recover from the burning down of her house, to atone.

  She had three days.

  And she was nearly three thousand kilometres away.

  Cold panic rushed in. Her throat tightened and she couldn’t breathe. Heaving down the window, she gasped the hot air.

  Eugene was still talking; she could hear the hurried clicks of a keyboard. ‘There’s a flight leaving Darwin at five this afternoon. What’s the time now …? Ten … okay, that’s seven hours away. How soon can you get to Darwin? It doesn’t look that far on the map. You can get there in time, right? I’ll book you this flight now. The dog can go on it, too. Mercy?’

  Mercy gazed into the traffic. She’d lost Andy entirely. They had not exchanged numbers—why would they? Things were entirely too casual, too road-tripping, too catch you later up the track for that. Her only option might be to cruise around the muggy streets of Katherine until she found him.

  ‘Mercy?’

  Maybe three days was plenty of time. She could fly out tomorrow, or even the next day. She could find Andy and have breakfast, and then drive to Darwin in an orderly fashion, calmly, feeling collected, grounded, and with time to spare.

  Except she couldn’t. Mercy knew that. Three days was nothing when two of them were a weekend, devoid of office hours. She needed to meet with the solicitors. She needed to prepare. Her house had burned down and so had everything in it: she needed to buy court shoes, make up and clean clothes—she couldn’t show up to coroner’s court and say, I did everything I could to save this woman’s life in too-large boots, a sweat-stained I ♥ SYDNEY T-shirt and cut-off denim shorts from the Coober Pedy op shop. And, it went without saying, she required the skills of a qualified hairdresser.

  Mercy had to get to Darwin today, and she had to get on that plane. And to make it in time for a five pm flight, she had to leave now.

  ‘Book the flight,’ she said to Eugene. ‘I’ll make it.’

  She didn’t wait to hear Eugene’s response. Dropping the phone on the seat, she started the van, knocked it into reverse and pulled back onto the street.

  When she caught her breath, she whispered, ‘Bye, Andy.’

  Then she drove through Katherine and out the other side. As she raced over the bridge, the deep bed of the Katherine River was far below; for Mercy now there would be no sandstone escarpments, no beautiful waterholes and hidden rock pools. Her trip was over. Pedal pressed to the floor, she headed north because she had no other choice.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Mercy drove for twenty minutes before she realised she could not keep driving like this.

  Trembling, bowels in a knot, she crouched over the wheel as if clinging to the handlebars of a motorbike. The van rattled and skipped, burped and wobbled. She needed to stop and fortify herself. Having missed breakfast—not even a cup of coffee—she needed to eat something, drink something.

  You have time, she told herself. It’s going to be okay. Legal obviously weren’t falling over themselves with angst—they’d moved up the inquest without her—so she shouldn’t be worried either, right? She still had six and a half hours until her flight, and only about four hours of driving. Better to take a few minutes and be calmer, thinking more clearly, than frazzled and heat-stroked and upside-down in a ditch.

  So Mercy pulled over. On a nondescript piece of highway she found a narrow track leading off into the bush and pulled in a short way. Surrounded by a copse of small, toothpick-like gums and watched over by the burning sun, she parked in the dappled shade and took deep breaths. She checked her phone but she’d lost service again. Eugene would have booked the flight for her; the thought of him dropping hundreds of dollars on her and being unable to pay him back right away set her teeth on edge. Eugene to the rescue. Eugene, the sensible one, the sane one, the rational one whose father hadn’t left when he was eight and whose mother hadn’t treated him like a mirror to reflect only her own grandeur and then gone ahead and died when that mirror had the audacity to finally turn away. Eugene, who even managed to make leaving his wife of six years for a hipster male barista seem like a sensible thing to do.

  It was too hot for a hot drink but Mercy needed to be alert. Properly alert, not anxiety alert, so she heated a cup of water, scooped in a half-teaspoon of coffee, then set it aside to cool while she chewed a muesli bar. She ate standing outside the van in the spotted shade. Insects whirred in the bush around her, singing with heat. Every now and then a vehicle sped past on the highway. Wasabi sniffed about, perfectly unhurried, while Mercy’s jaw worked fiercely as she chewed. She swallowed her lukewarm drink in three gulps.

  Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. She gave a sharp whistle and the dog came running and, in a slam of doors and belch of exhaust smoke, they were back on the road.

  As Mercy rushed up the highway, an old sense of powerlessness came over her. It was the irrefutable knowledge of fact: that no matter what she did, certain things could never be changed. Time, for instance—it moved the way it did regardless of what Mercy wanted to savour, or flee. No matter how much she coaxed the accelerator now, pushing the Hijet up the Stuart Highway, the clock ticked as it always had. It did not care about her plight, her need for time to please slow down.

  And genetics—that she was born the sole child of Loretta Blain was a biological fact she could never escape.

  Grief had come to Mercy in an erratic way when her mother died. It came late, of course—between the confusing, heart-breaking logistics of Eugene leaving and the bureaucratic and public shock of Tamara’s death, Mercy had had to close the door to grief over her mother and wait for it to pound the door down when it could no longer be denied. Because it would, that much she had known—and it did. In life, Loretta Blain would not endure long any wane in Mercy’s attention, and nor would she in death.

  Beneath her seat the engine was starting to whine. Mercy flexed her ankle, easing up on the accelerator. She glanced at the temperature gauge but the needle still hovered over cool.

  The grief had come between panic attacks. Sickening, angry, ugly grief. Grief that caused Mercy to throw coffee mugs against her kitchen wall and leave the shards on the floor for days. Grief that caused her to sit on the couch and stare at the wall, dry-eyed and parch-mouthed, unable to move. Grief that had slithered into her chest cavity like a slug, trails of slime up and down her limbs, and gorged itself on her heart until Mercy was nothing but flat, grey nothingness.

  The van shook with a sudden convulsion. Wasabi lifted his head and Mercy sat back in her seat, briefly lifting her hands from the juddering steering wheel. The van smoothed out, returning to its normal hum.

  Mercy drove on.

  ‘Mercy?—–you hear me?’

  ‘I can hear you, Eugene. But I’ve only got—’ she took the phone away from her ear and checked the screen, setting the van into a swerve ‘—one bar of service.’ She grabbed the wheel more tightly.

  ‘–—much longer?’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Are you—–sport—–junction?’

  ‘Sport what? Eugene, sorry, I can’t hear you.’


  The phone beeped. Eugene disappeared.

  An hour and a half after leaving Katherine, the highway was rolling up and down slow, sweeping hills, curving back and forth around long bends. Fuzzy clouds sat low in the sky; the humidity continued to soar.

  The van was halfway up a long incline when it started to shake. Mercy backed off the accelerator again, but the engine coughed and rattled.

  Mercy frowned, and said, ‘Oh—?’ before the Hijet wheezed like a choking animal, the wheel shook in her hands with the violence of an earthquake, and there was a tremendous, bone-shattering BANG.

  And then silence. The van slowed, moving without sound. All she could hear was the breeze against her ears and the tyres rolling over the bitumen. Terrified, Mercy tugged on the wheel, crunching off the road and coming to a halt on the shoulder.

  She was two hundred kilometres from Darwin. Dead silence filled the van. Smoke lifted, drifting lazily in the hot, breezeless air.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Stunned, Mercy sat in the driver’s seat of her silent van, watching curls of blue smoke drift past the windscreen.

  Then she jumped. Kicking open the door, she grabbed Wasabi and was running away from the van, sprinting into the vegetation. After crashing through the treeline, she spun on her heel, leaves crackling underfoot, looked back at the van and waited for it to burst into flames.

  A last puff of smoke dissolved, and then there was nothing. The van sat on the edge of the road. Not on fire. Not even a spark. It just sat there quietly in the baking heat, red dust covering its hand-painted flowers and obscuring Home is wherever you ARE.

  Mercy was having an out-of-body experience. Perhaps she was dreaming. Her consciousness was floating up, up, high up above her head and then it drifted around in a circle up there above the van, above the highway, above the sparse, endless scrub going Ha ha ha, would you look at this mess?!

  And then—THUMP—Mercy was back to earth. Back in her body, Mercy bent down, placed Wasabi on the ground, brought her hands to her face and, slowly, her eyes and mouth opened. Wider and wider, inch by inch, until her jaw hurt and her eyeballs stung in the swampy heat.

  She gaped down at Wasabi. He looked up at her, panting. She gaped at the van. It ticked quietly. Insects in the bush around her shrieked.

  ‘Oh,’ Mercy said. ‘God.’

  Gingerly, tentatively, she inched towards the van. She tiptoed, as if the stalled Hijet was a sleeping dragon. She sniffed the air for petrol fumes. She waited long agonising minutes, but the van just sat there on the side of the highway, not catching on fire.

  The driver’s door wouldn’t open, but Mercy wasn’t willing to thump her hip into it in case the whole thing exploded, so she crept to the passenger side, opened the door and clambered across the seats. Her hands shook dreadfully as she gripped the key in the ignition. Closing her eyes and holding her breath, she turned the key.

  A single click, then nothing.

  She tried again. Click. Silence.

  And again.

  It wasn’t out of petrol; she had filled the tank from the jerry can when she had stopped just out of Katherine. But mechanically, it could be anything else and she wouldn’t know how to fix it. It didn’t matter whether it was a simple, easily remedied technical fault or something catastrophic—there was nothing she could do. Nothing she knew how to do.

  ‘Oh shit,’ she yelped. ‘Oh Christ, no!’

  It was almost noon. She had just over five hours left.

  Now Mercy panicked.

  Never leave your vehicle.

  Wasn’t that one of the fundamental rules of being stranded in the outback? Mercy wondered as her anxious footsteps crunched along the highway shoulder. Always stay with your vehicle. Like in a horror movie—never say, ‘I’ll be right back.’ The viewer just knows that the character who says ‘I’ll be right back’ is about to meet the wrong end of a long knife. Repeatedly. Wasabi trotted along beside her, zigzagging about on the end of his lead, sniffing the ground, lifting his short leg over tufts of weed. Having a grand old time, blissfully oblivious to their predicament. Mercy tried to draw some strength and calm from his oblivion, but she was failing. Her entire body was quivering, as if it was held together not by bones and sinew but by cotton and string.

  She turned around to look back at the van, stalled halfway down the hill. The highway was a silver cut in a shroud of green; the van was a sad dot of dusty metal. She hadn’t walked far, only a hundred metres or so; she was heading towards the top of this long rise, hoping that when she reached the crest she would see a town on the other side. Or a petrol station. Or even just a bar of phone service.

  Besides, she tried to tell herself, she wasn’t stranded in the outback. Not technically. Stranded in the outback would be one’s vehicle shitting itself in the middle of a desert. Here she was, at the side of one of the country’s major highways. She wasn’t going to perish alone, slowly dehydrating, eroding into a skeleton and getting covered by the dusts of time.

  No. On this highway, vehicles zoomed past every few minutes. There was plenty of civilisation here. Mercy was going to be fine.

  The problem was, none of those vehicles were stopping. And compounding that, Mercy didn’t want any of them to stop. Because that was another fundamental lesson from a horror movie, wasn’t it? Just when you think the character, filled with relief and gratitude, is about to be rescued by a kind stranger, the kind stranger turns out to have a shotgun under their seat and a penchant for making handbags out of human skin.

  Which, she reminded herself, was the exact reason she had fled the rest area outside Elliot. Strident bars from ‘Stairway To Heaven’ wailed into her mind.

  Down the bottom of the hill, a fuel tanker glimmered into view, the long white barrels of its trailers gleaming in the sun. A truck driver whose salary was paid by a major fuel franchise would surely be trustworthy, wouldn’t they? Mercy watched the truck approach, and felt her hand lift meekly. She thought of her five pm flight and lifted her hand higher. The truck barrelled closer and closer, hauling up the hill, engine roaring. Mercy waved her arm.

  The truck roared past in a shower of grit and diesel fumes. Hot air blasted her body. The driver gave her a friendly wave.

  ‘Thanks, jerk,’ Mercy cried at the truck’s retreating trailer.

  She checked her phone again. Still no service. It was just on noon. She had five hours before she had to be on that plane.

  So, trucks were a lost cause. The only trucks Mercy would have been comfortable flagging down were the big, shiny corporate ones—yet those were clearly the trucks that would not pick her up. The absurdly rich multinationals probably had a whole procedural manual’s worth of policy about not picking up hitchhikers, broken-down travellers or stranded women and sausage dogs, no matter how sweaty and frantic they appeared.

  No trucks then. No sedans, because they slipped past without even looking at her, giving off an in your dreams vibe. Grey nomads in their four-wheel drives and caravans slowed enough to stare, and sometimes the wives gave a sympathetic little smile, but none of them stopped. And definitely no battered utes with huge wheels and pig-dog cages on the back—those, Mercy hid from by dashing into the bush.

  Another half-hour passed. Forty-five minutes. The sun was an inferno and the air pulsed with heat. Mercy crouched in the shade of the Hijet and tried to conserve water by not crying.

  Just before one pm, Mercy heard an engine approach, the sound of it slowing down. Peering around the side of the van, readying herself to hide or signal for help or curse at the vehicle’s retreating form, she instead jumped to her feet and waved.

  The silver LandCruiser and Jayco Starcraft pulled off the road and came to a stop, idling behind the Hijet. The driver’s door opened and Bert called out, ‘Got yourself in a bit of a jam, did you, love?’

  Mercy had never been so happy to see a shirt with so many pockets.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Bert stepped out of his four-wheel drive and strode over. ‘Wa
nt me to take a look?’

  ‘Could you?’ Mercy said gratefully. ‘I’ve got to be at the airport at five to catch a flight.’

  Bert glanced at his watch. ‘Crikey, love, you’re cutting it a bit fine.’

  ‘Well, earlier I wasn’t … but, yes, now I am.’

  ‘Did it overheat?’ Bert ran a hand over the front of the van, squatted down to peer underneath.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Mercy chewed her lip as Bert moved to inspect the inside of the van, studying the dashboard. ‘The temperature gauge didn’t seem to think so.’

  ‘That’s because the gauge is cactus.’

  ‘It’s a what?’

  ‘The temperature gauge.’ Bert tapped the dial. ‘It’s stuffed. The needle’s stuck on cold, see?’

  Mercy moved closer and looked. She said, ‘Oh.’ She put her head in her hands and tugged on the remaining tufts of her hair.

  ‘Never mind, dear.’ Bert’s wife, Jan, came alongside Mercy and patted her back.

  Deftly, Bert flipped up the seats and the top of the engine appeared. Swells of metal, tangles of wire and hose. Mercy peered around Bert’s crouching form, hoping she might be able to identify something and say, There! Look, that’s come off and simply needs to be reattached!

  After a few minutes of poking, prodding and wriggling, Bert made a noise and retreated from the van, shaking his head. Mercy was almost waiting for him to produce an oily rag from his belt and start wiping his hands.

  ‘You’ve got a split radiator hose,’ he said. ‘Real nasty—the hose is busted right open. What happened before it stopped?’

  ‘Well,’ Mercy said, ‘it shook a bit, and made a funny noise, and then it just—’ she swallowed a tightening in her throat ‘—stopped.’

  ‘Did it go bang?’

  ‘Bang?’

  ‘Yeah. Boom. Like a gunshot.’

  Mercy nodded. ‘Yes. Now that you mention it. It did go bang.’