Roadside Sisters

by Roadside Sisters (epub)

  Meredith bent over the map again. ‘There’re no turn-offs on this road. It looks like it’s a dead end.’

  ‘What?! Give me that!’ Annie turned to grab at the map.

  ‘LOOK OUT!’ Meredith yelled as a flash of white skittered past the windscreen.

  Annie turned back and wrenched the steering wheel hard right. The RoadMaster did as it was bid and swerved off the road. It faithfully and purposefully dropped its front wheels into the fast-running water channel. The beast tipped, and planted its snub nose deep into the mud.

  Annie and Meredith lurched towards the windscreen, saved from smashing through it by their seatbelts. In the rear of the cabin, the toilet door was flung open and Nina fell out onto the floor with her knickers around her ankles. She slid right down the length of the cabin on a slippery slide of raw sewage.

  The motor hissed and died. Again, it was hardly what you’d call a Thelma and Louise moment.

  Fourteen

  It was difficult to know who was most startled by this turn of events. Annie and Meredith up front, with their feet jammed against the windscreen? Nina, in a crumpled heap by the table? Or the bald-headed white ibis, now winging its way back to its nest in the Everlasting Swamp? It was, for all of them, a close call—although, as Meredith, Annie and Nina considered their plight, they couldn’t see how it could have been much worse.

  The van was tipped at a thirty-five-degree angle, its back wheels barely on the edge of the road. Black, viscous water was already seeping through the cabin doors and pooling on the rubber matting in the foot wells under the dashboard.

  The slick of sewage that had slopped over the rim of the shallow toilet bowl had stopped running, and was now soaking into various squares of carpeting and floor mats. Every loose item on every bench—cameras, sunglasses, books, the chopping board, binoculars, shoes, sunhats and plastic baskets of sunscreen, pens, lip balm and moisturiser—had been dashed to the floor. To add to the carnage, when Annie had last raided the fridge she hadn’t secured its top latch, so that the appliance had spewed its insides through an open, lolling door. Eggs, milk and fruit, split plastic containers of leftover bolognaise sauce, olives and camembert cheese, had all been vomited up and were marinating in a stinking stew. Outside, the rain was steadily drumming on untold millions of mangrove leaves. A biblical multitude of mosquitoes had been disturbed and now smelled an opportunity.

  Nina cried first. That was understandable. She had been sitting on the loo, doubled over and clutching her writhing gut; she’d had no warning they were driving pell-mell into disaster. She had been violently upended from her plastic perch, bashed her head on the sink and then been unceremoniously ejected into the cabin, landing on her bare arse. She was wailing with pain and indignity in equal measure.

  Meredith was the next one to crack, although it wasn’t outright weeping. Nina thought it sounded more like the whimpering of one of Anton’s guinea pigs.

  Annie willed herself not to cry. Couldn’t. Shouldn’t. Wouldn’t. Instead she unbuckled her seatbelt and fell forward and the gear stick jammed into her ribs. ‘Fuck!’ Annie knew that she’d never been so precise in her employment of the expletive in her whole life. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’

  ‘For God’s sake, do you think swearing’s going to help?’ Meredith sniffed. Her reading glasses might have been smashed, but her sense of outrage was still intact.

  ‘I think I might have broken something,’ moaned Nina. She suddenly had an image of herself as Shelley Winters in the Poseidon Adventure—everyone thinking that she was too fat to make it—but her heart would go on . . . and on. Or was that Titanic? Amazing, she thought, how leading ladies had become younger and slimmer, but more buoyant during the past quarter of a century.

  Meredith also unbuckled her seatbelt and extended her palm to brace herself for the drop against the hard dashboard. Nina might be seriously injured. She had to assess the situation.

  She clambered between the front seats to the cabin behind. ‘Where does it hurt?’ She gently placed her palm on Nina’s shin, which looked to be bruising already.

  ‘Everywhere. But I think my ankle copped the worst of it. Ow!’

  ‘Can you move it?’ Nina obediently wriggled her toes and turned her foot. ‘Well then, I guess that means it’s not broken,’ Meredith diagnosed, drawing on some rudimentary medical knowledge from Girl Guides. ‘Let’s hope it’s just a sprain. My God, it reeks in here!’

  ‘The first thing we’d better do is try to ring roadside assist.’ Annie reached into the glovebox. ‘I’ll get the number. It’s in the folder. Let’s hope there’s reception out here.’

  Annie found her BlackBerry and mumbled a silent prayer to the God of Telecommunications but there was, predictably, no coverage. They were, as Meredith had already helpfully mentioned, precisely in the middle of nowhere and way out of mobile range.

  ‘My God, what are we going to do now?’ gasped Nina. It was a very good question and no-one had any good answer for it. There was a long silence between them as the rain steadily beat down—and then, instantly, ceased.

  Annie located a road map, opened the driver’s door and jumped down to the roadway. The low cloud was clearing fast, and the heat of the afternoon sun was already evaporating the moisture and raising a plume of steam from every broad, thick leaf. The light was refracting through dripping water, creating a shifting mosaic of silver and gold. Annie immediately thought of Lizzie, and the old familiar feeling of loss, on top of everything else, had her blinking back tears. She shielded her eyes from the bright shards of reflection to peer at the map.

  The estuary was a jigsaw of channels, lagoons, sand bars and alluvial islands—Oyster Channel, Rabbit Island, Shark Creek, Crystal Waters. Fish, prawns and oysters spawned here. Waterbirds nested. Insects swarmed in the silvery grey, oily mud. It was the sounds Annie was most amazed by. Water was running fast in the channel by the roadway; beyond that, in the thick density of mangrove leaf and root, frogs chorused, birds called and the air hummed with buzzing creatures—every living thing had been invigorated by the fierce tropical storm. Along the road in both directions there was nothing to see but more mangrove trees.

  Meredith’s head emerged from the door, but the brutality of the light and steaming humidity sent her reeling back inside. She stood gripping the corner of the kitchen benchtop as one horrifying thought pushed everything else from her mind. Crocodiles! There would be crocodiles submerged in the vile, stinking swamp. Meredith had seen enough Hollywood disaster movies to know what came next. At nightfall a huge monster of a thing would emerge and pull them one by one, screaming, to a gruesome death. Nina, with her swollen ankle, might hold them all back, and so would have to be sacrificed first.

  ‘Annie! Come back inside,’ Meredith called. ‘There could be anything out there.’

  ‘I know,’ Annie called back. ‘You should come and have a look. It’s like the mud is moving. It’s incredible.’

  ‘Crocodiles!’ screeched Meredith, stumbling back and tripping over Nina’s prostrate form.

  ‘Ow! Careful! My ankle!’

  ‘There are no crocodiles!’ Annie shook her head in disbelief at Meredith’s amateur theatrics. ‘We’re way too far south for crocodiles. I meant crabs! There’re thousands of ’em, everywhere.’

  Meredith slammed the van door with annoyance. Here she was, in the worst predicament she could ever recall being in—apart from that time she had dysentery in Bombay—and Annie was narrating a fascinating nature documentary.

  Inspecting the vehicle for damage, Annie was surprised to find none. Not from this accident anyway. There were various scrapes in evidence from Nina’s misadventures. The front of the RoadMaster was lodged solidly in the mud up to its bonnet but seemed to have, like Nina, suffered a mighty indignity more than anything else.

  Elvis was still singing. The reflective jewels on his jumpsuit were sparkling in the sunset. However, the light was dimming fast. In another moment it would drop behind the trees and be gone. Annie esti
mated that in a scarce half-hour all would be pitch-black. There was probably a farm a way back—but how far? It could be ten kilometres. Annie didn’t care to make the walk alone in the dark. Rescue looked to be impossible until morning, but there was not one flat surface inside the van they could sleep on. It was time to accept their fate and set up camp on the road for the night. The first thing they had to do was to get Nina outside and wash the shit off her.

  Meredith had been itching to say what was on her mind since she had woken earlier that afternoon and found that Annie was delivering them into a wilderness. As it turned out, the opportunity to savage her pig-headed travelling companion soon presented itself.

  Nina had suffered the humiliation of standing out on the roadway nude, on one leg, using Meredith as a crutch. Annie washed her down with cold soapy water from a bucket. She couldn’t remember suffering such mortification since the twins were born and she’d sat in a kiddie playpool in the maternity ward trying to ease her labour pains. Meredith and Annie conducted themselves with quiet professionalism as she moaned and she was grateful for that at least.

  They had all worked together by the van’s dim interior lights to throw out the stinking matting and ruined foodstuffs, sluice down the floors of the van with disinfectant and pack away some of the items catapulted in the crash. After that, they’d sat outside on the road on camp chairs, plastered with insect repellent, and shared a candlelit supper of cheese, salami, dry biscuits and a jar of gourmet jalapeno dip. Annie had made a head start on a bottle of Margaret River merlot.

  Another round of Nina’s medication had done the trick and her stomach felt easier. Meredith had gulped down enough Ural to catch her cystitis before it travelled to her kidneys and caused any more discomfort. Now, at the rear of the vehicle, work continued by the light of a torch balanced on Nina’s knee. A decision had been made to erect a makeshift tent over assorted bedding in the event of another storm rolling in during the night. They swatted at an infinite cloud of insects attracted by the torch’s piercing blue glow.

  ‘What’s Brad going to say?’ Nina moaned as she watched Annie and Meredith work up a sweat dragging mattresses out of the front door in the still-humid evening. To Annie, it seemed that Nina had said this a hundred times and now, enough was enough.

  ‘Who cares what Brad bloody well says?’ she snapped, and then sucked her index finger where the sharp edge of a blue plastic groundsheet had sliced her skin.

  Meredith let go of the broom she was balancing and it clattered on the roadway: ‘Well, that’s exactly the comment you would expect from someone who’s single. But some of us have families to think about.’

  Annie pointed an accusing bloodied digit at Meredith. ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

  Nina groaned and dropped her head on her folded arms. A storm was rolling in all right—a nasty female tornado, right in front of her at ground level.

  ‘It means exactly what you think it means.’ Meredith was defiant, and leaned into the shaft of torchlight to catch Annie’s eye. ‘If you weren’t so damned selfish, you’d be considering someone else’s feelings instead of thinking about yourself all the time. If you did that, you might have a relationship and not be so bloody mean and miserable.’

  Annie was stunned by the ferocity of Meredith’s attack, and could only manage: ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘It’s too late for manners now.’

  Annie hurled the plastic sheeting she was holding to the ground. ‘Yes, and I’ve noticed the joy your marriage has brought you, Meredith. Let’s face it, you’ve spent your entire life doing exactly what you wanted to do. And while you weren’t looking, your whole family buggered off. You don’t even know who your own daughter is marrying. Fuck you!’

  Meredith crossed her arms and marched furiously into the darkness just beyond the torchlight. Fear of snapping crocodiles propelled her back towards the side of the van.

  Nina, sitting in a camp chair, concentrated hard on the throbbing pain in her leg to take her away from the hideous reality she was facing. ‘C’mon now,’ she pleaded, ‘we’re all tired. Let’s just—’

  ‘And look at Nina!’ continued Annie. ‘Trapped at the kitchen sink for years. You think I want a life like that?’

  Nina opened her mouth to defend herself, and then decided she was in too much pain to go on with it.

  ‘It seems to me, Meredith,’ Annie spat, ‘that the whole bullshit about women “having it all”—all that feminist crap you and Briony spouted back then—was just a way to get you out of the sheer boredom of motherhood. You’ve got no right to judge me and how my life’s ended up. I’m the one who’s independent.’

  ‘Independent my backside,’ snarled Meredith. ‘Half your waking hours are spent looking through an empty bottle, your mouth like an ashtray, trying to remember who you slept with last night.’

  It was Annie’s turn to stomp into the safe anonymity of darkness. Meredith shouted at her retreating back: ‘YOU’VE MADE A MESS OF YOUR LIFE JUST AS MUCH AS WE HAVE!’

  That pronouncement hung limply in the air while they each paused to consider it. The noise of nameless life roiling in the mud, and a distant rumble of thunder, stopped any thought of going on with the argument for now.

  ‘Let’s just get this tent up. I really need to lie down.’ Nina sighed. She was too weary to bother with her usual ‘look over there’ routine. There was, after all, no ‘over there’ to look at. Beyond the small pool of light coming from her torch, the night was utterly black. The moon was obscured by a scarf of stray cloud, and seemed reluctant to show its face in this company.

  Nina hung her head. She had thought they’d come to some understanding over the past few days, that the three of them were beginning to find a true connection—and at the first test the whole elaborate construction had shattered. If this was the touchstone of female friendship she had longed for all these years, Nina had no use for it.

  It must have been about 9 pm, although it felt much later. They were bundled, fully clothed, in their beds on the side of the road. Annie was wrapped in a doona and lying on a random collection of cushions assembled from the seats around the van’s table. She had angled her head so that she was looking out from under the plastic sheet and into the heavens. She sought the constellation of the Southern Cross in the night sky. There it was! Ever since she was small, Annie had felt comforted by the sight of those four stars and the tiny pointer and it was the same tonight. She wasn’t so far from home as long as the Southern Cross was in view. The air was cool and damp. Under her feathery cover, Annie was as safe as a baby white ibis under its mother’s wings.

  She considered what Meredith had said—that if she weren’t so selfish she would have a partner by now. This trip was showing her just how singular she had become. For years now she had only had herself to please in her one-bedroom flat and she called that ‘independence’, but now she could see the years of solitude stretching before her and couldn’t find much joy in the prospect. But then again, the challenge of ‘sharing’—if this trip was anything to go by—seemed equally daunting. Maybe she was already too old to change.

  Meredith and Nina were lying side by side on a double mattress. They were both comfortable enough, despite the stifling closeness under the sagging plastic cover. Nina was nibbling at a block of chocolate and crunching hazelnuts in Meredith’s ear. Nina’s shin and ankle were still throbbing, but she liked to imagine that the sugar was going some way to ease the pain.

  Meredith was appalled at her harsh words to Annie and had been stung by her equally barbed response. It was true, she had always had an excuse for not being at home—store inventory, trade fairs, trips overseas to locate new stock—and she had let her family stray. She wasn’t sure why she’d done it. If she hadn’t seen Sigrid for a year and a half and didn’t know who she was marrying, it was her own fault and no-one else’s.

  Meredith made a heroic effort to keep her worst nightmares at bay. Crocodiles were probably the least of her worries. She re
trieved a small torch and her novel from her handbag and attempted to read the tiny print in a small circle of illumination. Although, after rereading the same dramatic passage for the fifth time, she realised that this particular tale of bloodthirsty Nepalese insurgents in the foothills of the Himalayas wasn’t bringing her any comfort. She closed her book and clicked off the light. The night instantly moved in to smother her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Meredith,’ came Annie’s disembodied voice from the darkness. Nina stopped crunching chocolate to hear what might come next. Meredith rolled over and could make out the lump of Annie’s bedding just a few feet away.

  ‘You know something?’ Annie continued. ‘I’ve never really had any close female friends. I’ve had the chance to have them, I’ve known lots of great girls, but I just let the relationships slide. And I know it’s been hurtful when I haven’t returned calls or sent birthday cards, and I’ve been thinking about that on this trip. Why do I do that?

  ‘Now I think I know. You remember what I said about not wanting kids because of Lizzie dying? I think it’s the same with the women in my life. I’ve somehow thought that if I got too close, depended on them, they might be taken away from me.

  ‘I’ve got male friends. I’m comfortable with men. But I know I can be distant with women, and critical. So, I’m sorry. Being here with you on this trip has been one of the best things I’ve ever done with other women, and I’m glad Nina made me come.’

  Nina realised she’d been holding her breath while Annie spoke. She waited for her usual comic sign-off of ‘Hey, just kidding’ and heard nothing.

  Beside her, Meredith sighed deeply. ‘Thanks,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry too. I think I started it.’ Annie’s heartfelt confession had touched her and she now felt she wanted to make her own. ‘You’re right about the whole female friend thing.’ Meredith rolled onto her back. ‘I’m the same. I have plenty of acquaintances, of course—women who come into the store regularly, and a few I play tennis with—but not anyone I could call a real friend. You know, tell everything to, who’d give me advice.