“Sam’s from… just up the road, here. He’s… oh, there they go. Ride him, Sam. Ride him, mate. That’s it, Sam. Ride him, cowboy. Ride him. Stay on mate. Ride him, Sa— oh, he’s off.”
And that was our first rodeo! Which has allowed me to say, whenever the occasion allows, and with complete honesty: “This ain’t my first rodeo…”
I’m told I use that phrase far too often.
Sleep was a long time coming that night. Every time we were about to drift off, one of us would mutter, “Ride him, cowboy,” and we’d all crack up again.
But there was something else keeping us awake, too.
In the middle of the campsite there was a small tent, not unlike ours – and inside that small tent, a new couple were… Hm. How to put this delicately?
They were shagging like deranged monkeys.
That was delicate, right?
Because tents aren’t famed for their sound insulation, the entire campsite was in on the act – from first whispered suggestions to every groan and moan of pleasure.
And because the clever couple had left a light on – an iPhone, by the looks of things – a detailed silhouette of every thrust and every jiggling boobie was writ large across the skin of the tent. It was like drive-in movie, except we didn’t need the radio to hear the sound track – they could probably hear it in Perth.
He had some stamina, that lad. It went on for hours.
When a last shuddering gasp announced the end of the evening’s entertainment, a spontaneous round of applause erupted from the surrounding tents.
I joined in, whilst also pretending to share Gill and Roo’s disgust.
Secretly, I had to admit – I’d have been quite proud of that, if it had been me in there.
That was the last thought I had, before I dozed off.
I woke up with a horrible realisation that the worst thing in the world had just happened.
I looked around me in the darkness, searching for clues to this sudden feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. What on earth could be so wrong?
I couldn’t figure out what, or why, until I’d given up trying and snuggled back into my sleeping bag, seeking the threads of my last dream. It had been something particularly delicious…
And then I knew it. Just like that – all bets were off.
Suddenly I perceived what the worst thing in the world was – and just why I’d been unable to place it before. It was because it was disguised most cunningly, as one of the best things in the world – all the better to take me unawares.
I’d had a sex-dream about Roo.
It changed everything. Because now, instead of being a carefree traveller, bunking up with his sister and her friend, at the start of a potentially endless adventure – I was Man. And in my sights was Woman.
I knew from past experience that once my mind got a grip on an idea like this, it wouldn’t let me rest. I could tell myself to forget it all I wanted, but I had no control over my mind. Sometimes, I swear it does things just to piss me off.
This was a prime example. Out of all the women it could have started to fantasise about, why did it have to be Roo?
Roo had very gallantly been sleeping between Gill and I, simply because it felt a bit weird for us to be sleeping right next to each other. I mean, we’d done it before of course – whilst renovating a house in the Welsh Valleys, where we’d had no choice – but this was a different environment. People were bound to ask about our sleeping arrangements, when we rocked up at a campsite and pitched a single tent between the three of us. So Roo had slipped in between us on the first night, and although we’d never felt the need to discuss the arrangement, I’m sure we were all fairly happy with it.
Until now.
Because suddenly, I was sleeping right next to the woman I wanted most in all the world. In fact our feet were touching. I was awake, I was aroused, and all I could think of was how close she was. And how delicate. How tiny her earlobe looked, on the side of her head that wasn’t currently pressed into a foam roll-matt. She breathed so peacefully, so regularly, so gently, so… seductively.
Ohhhh…. Shit.
This was going to be a problem.
A stronger man might have forced those images from his head. Might have laid back down, facing the other way, and made himself think about war movies, or poverty in the third world, or a possible link between relativity and quantum theory (perhaps my ideas of ‘strong’ and ‘geeky’ have gotten a bit mixed up over the years?) – but no. Sadly, I am not that strong.
So I did what a weak man would do: I rolled over, away from Roo… and continued fantasising about her. This will all blow over, I told myself, just as soon as I get some action. It’s an infantile fantasy based solely on the fact that I’m sleeping less than six inches away from the most desirable woman on the planet. Once we hit a real town, I’m bound to meet some other chicks. Then I won’t even notice how biteable that earlobe is. Or how soft the line of her jaw is… that smooth patch of skin below her cheek that would just tingle if I were to stroke a fingertip along it…
Oh, bloody hell!
There was no two ways about it: I was in trouble.
Hell’s Crack
Leaving Broome was one of the more contentious decisions we made.
I loved the place; I’d have happily stayed there, if I’d been sure of a job. Sadly, we were all running out of money; traveling in Rusty was proving to be more expensive than we’d expected. Broome, though delightfully laid back, was a tourist-town – one without tourists, for the most part. Jobs for three of us in such a tiny place would be difficult to arrange.
So we hit the road, heading inland, leaving behind those crystal clear waters and that infinite expanse of white sand. In return, we got dust; and the further inland we went, the more dreamlike the lush green coast seemed.
On our second day of driving we came across a rest-area with a billabong, or swimming hole. Exerting a great effort of will, I managed to avoid peeking at Roo as she changed into her bikini, and we swam, leaving plumes of red dust in our wake.
It wasn’t until we’d dried off, climbed back into Rusty, and were preparing to re-join the highway that we saw the warning sign; it was cunningly positioned on the exit slip road, at least for anyone traveling in our direction.
‘DANGER – CROCODILES INHABIT THIS AREA,’ it said.
‘Do NOT enter the water. Attacks cause injury or death.’
“Glad they waited till now to tell us,” I said, “or we’d never have got to swim!”
Our second brush with death came just a couple of hours later. We were cruising along at top speed, when there was an almighty BANG! – and the car slewed across the road. It would have been right into the path of the oncoming traffic, except we hadn’t seen another car for almost an hour. Suddenly we were skidding, swerving, and someone was screaming.
“FUCKFUCKSHITFUCKAAAARRRHHH!”
Back on the right side of the road, Rusty slowed to a halt as Roo smoothly applied the brakes. And we sat there for a few seconds, in a swirling cloud of red dust, and caught our breath.
“Everyone okay?” I asked the girls.
They were both staring at me. Ahh! So that’s who’d been doing the screaming. In my defence, I’d like to point out that I was in fact screaming for two, as Roo had remained so calm that she obviously hadn’t noticed the danger we were in.
“Did we explode?” I asked her.
“Ah, a little. But don’t worry, it’s just a blow-out.”
“A blow out of what?”
“A tyre! That’s all. When you mix hot roads and old tyres, this always happens. No biggie.”
“NO… no biggie? If that had happened… in the middle of…”
Roo had the grace to ignore me. She jumped out to check on the damage. Gill was already staring at it, a look of awe on her face. I slid the side door open, trying to be gentle in spite of the adrenaline coursing pointlessly through my body. The tyre – Rusty’s front left (passenger side) – was ruined. I
mean, I’ve seen some punctures, but this was something else. The whole tyre was torn apart, a tangled mess of steel wires and shredded rubber. For the last fifty metres we’d been driving on the wheel rim, and it had gouged a perfect pattern of swerve-arcs into the sun-softened tarmac behind us.
“See?” said Roo. “Just a blow-out. Let’s get the spare.”
I was still in shock. The state of the tyre suggested we’d run over a land mine, but this wasn’t a good time to stand around discussing it. Rusty had a rack mounted underneath his back end to carry the spare wheel, but like everything else on him it had been broken when the girls had bought him. Unlike everything else, they hadn’t bothered fixing it, which meant that the spare lived in the boot – underneath every other piece of gear we owned.
It took a good ten minutes to unload, by which point our possessions were stacked all over the highway. Crates of food wobbled unsteadily atop piles of books, folding chairs lay in a heap with rucksacks stacked next to them – and the wheel itself was finally liberated from the bowels of the vehicle. Deciding I needed to display a more manly aspect from here on in, I volunteered to change the wheel, and was again amazed at the wreckage of a tyre I removed.
“Careful,” Roo pointed, “the metal bits are sharp!”
Honestly, I never even knew there were metal bits in a tyre.
Back in, repacked, and rolling once more, I asked Roo how she had remained so calm.
“That’s all you can do, really,” she told me. “The heat of the road makes the tyres so hot, that if they have a weak spot they’re bound to blow. All you can do is try to keep the car under control, and slow down gently. If you panic and brake too hard you could spin around and flip the car. You just have to not freak out, really. And keep both hands on the wheel.”
I glanced at Gill. Between my tendency to panic, and her patented one-finger driving technique, we weren’t best suited to handle this sort of situation. But… realistically it would never happen again. Right? I asked Roo if it had happened to her before. Her response was less encouraging that I’d hoped.
“Oh, not for a while,” she said.
We limped into a tiny town called Halls Creek, Roo taking it nice and slow, as our spare tyre had originally been the worst of the bunch. Losing one shitty tyre to the super-heated road was unlucky; losing two would be careless. Not to mention, it would have been a very long, very hot walk into town to buy a new one. So we rolled calmly up the main street and discovered a garage fairly quickly – because there was sod all else in Halls Creek, beyond a bottle shop and a library.
No prize for guessing which was doing the most business!
I hadn’t encountered many aborigines so far, and this first glimpse was less than ideal.
Although the vast majority of Australia’s original inhabitants have either integrated into modern society, or continue to pursue their tribal way of life in more remote areas, there are, of course, outcasts. Alcohol abuse proved to be a particularly difficult issue for indigenous communities, and the collision of Western values with their own has produced its fair share of casualties.
Hall’s Creek, it seemed, was where they’d ended up.
Sitting around town, in every patch of shade they could find, were family groups large and small, all dressed in dirty, ragged clothes (except the children, who were naked). They sprawled on the grass around every tree – and in every single hand, there was a can of beer.
The garage mechanic was missing half his teeth, more than half his wits, and was far more focussed on scratching something nasty on the back of his neck than he was on our ruined tyre. He took one look at Rusty and did that drawn-out whistle thing mechanics do. It must be taught on their apprenticeship, as a way of softening up customers before the hammer-blow of the price quotation. To me, it signals that a con is about to be attempted – and in this case, I was dead right.
“Yeah, you’ll be needing a light truck tyre for one of those.”
“Really? A light truck? Is that… big?”
“It’s expensive. Can’t just use yer regular tyre, not on that thing.”
“What have we got on it now then?”
“All different. I’ll have to do both your front ones, or they won’t match. It’ll be $150 per tyre.”
We exchanged shocked glances. $150 was more than we’d bargained for. Twice $150 was…
“That’s ridiculous!” said Roo. “Thanks, but I think we’ll try somewhere else.”
“Nowhere else in town,” the bloke said.
Luckily, he was lying about that too.
On the second of Halls Creek’s two streets, we had much better luck. A slightly more honest mechanic sold us a $50 stock tyre for $90, and we decided to get the hell out of Halls Creek as fast as possible.
It was a run-down junkyard of a town, with weathered, ramshackle buildings and a populace of shambling, incoherent, unwashed drunks. It seemed like no-one wanted to help us, or even wanted us there at all. There was something unwholesome about the place; we had no scientific basis for this feeling, but we all shared it.
If the zombie apocalypse had happened a decade ago, Halls Creek is what the whole world would look like now.
Gill summed it up best, as we sped past a ‘Welcome’ sign riddled with bullet holes; “That place was an absolute shit hole.”
“Yeah, glad we’re out of there,” I added.
“Let’s never go back,” said Roo.
Return To Hell’s Crack
An hour out of town, Roo started swearing under her breath. This was very unlike her, from what I knew so far, and enough to be of concern. But even more concerning was the fact that I couldn’t quite see her anymore. The air in Rusty was rarely what you would call wholesome, but this time it had a definite opaque quality to it.
To put it another way, Roo was engulfed in smoke.
“I’m gonna have to pull over,” she said, tension in her voice. “The temperature is off the gauge. I think… I think we’ve got a problem.”
The words had barely left her lips when there was a ‘CLUNK’ from somewhere beneath us, followed by a regular clicking, as of two metal things hitting against each other. I have a fairly limited experience of cars, but as I understand it, this sort of noise is rarely a good thing.
There was a rest-stop just ahead. Roo coasted into it and brought Rusty to a shuddering halt.
“Lucky there’s a place to stop here,” I said.
“For what it’s worth…”
She waved her hand at the view from the windscreen. This ‘rest-area’ was little more than a flat semicircle of dirt and gravel, separated from the road itself by a narrow strip of dead brown grass. The ‘little more’ came in the form of a single stunted tree, which Roo had brought us to rest alongside.
We piled out into the blazing sun, and gathered around Roo’s door. Rusty’s engine was underneath the driver’s seat, which was every bit as bad a design flaw as it sounds. Access required folding the seat back to reveal a small hatch – a hatch that, at the moment, seemed to be spewing steam…
We set up our chairs in the tree’s scant shade, and dragged out the Esky. Then we sat and ate sandwiches, feeling very civilized about it, if a bit ridiculous. No cars passed in this time. When we felt Rusty’s engine had cooled enough to risk a look, we crowded around the driver’s door while Roo popped the seat catches. Smoke or steam or some noxious combination of both spilled out of the engine hatch as she folded the seat back out of the way. Inside… well, it looked like an engine. I craned my neck for a better view, and saw a complex assortment of interconnected parts, all covered with thick red dust. Yup – it was definitely an engine in there.
“So, Roo, what’s wrong with it?” I figured she had the best chance of knowing. At least I hoped so. Because for all I knew, we could have blown the flux capacitor.
“Hmmm…” said Roo. She poked a finger in and pressed delicately on a few different components. “This fan seems a bit loose.” She pressed on it to demonstrate, and it gave a cou
ple of inches before springing back into place.
“Is that normal?”
“It’s… I don’t know. Maybe?”
“CAR!” yelled Gill. She’d been at the back of our little scrum, and was too short to look into the engine compartment anyway, so she’d been watching the road. Now she ran out and waved at the car – a typically monstrous four-wheel-drive truck.
The car slowed – drivers out here being more prepared to help than the average – and it pulled into the rest-stop in a cloud of dust.
“G’day fellas!” The car’s occupant was a cheerful Aussie bloke, wearing the ubiquitous white vest known (to the people that don’t wear them) as a ‘wife beater’. “What’s going on?”
“Well…” I gestured at the car.
The bloke wasted no time. In less than a minute he had his hands deep in our engine, fiddling with something or other. Now, most Aussie blokes know their cars. Kind of like English blokes and football. Anyone living this far from civilization has to have a bit of technical know-how. But sometimes they can be a bit like me – their enthusiasm outstrips their ability.
“I reckon this is your problem,” he said, giving the fan a firm shake. “No way it should move like this…” there was a muted CRACK! from the engine compartment.
“Oh shit! Look!” he lifted the whole fan, plus the white plastic tank it was attached to, right out of the car. “Yeah, this definitely shouldn’t come out.”
Ah. You don’t say.
“So, is there anything you can do?” I wasn’t very hopeful by this point.
“Nah, mate. She’s knackered! You’d better call the RAC. Get a tow back to town.”
Ohhhh crap. Not that town.
“You’re in the RAC, right?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Right-o! On me way back, I’ll bring you a bag of ice, if you’re still here. It’s getting hot, eh! And you’re stuck right out in the middle of it!”
And with that, he was gone. I couldn’t be sure, but I had a feeling we were substantially worse off than before he’d arrived. If only his technical skills had matched his ability to state the obvious, we’d have been well on our way by now. But he’d been dead right – it was hot. And getting hotter. We had to get out of the sun, if we could.
Kamikaze Kangaroos! Page 8