by Kathryn Hind
Amelia turned. ‘I just want to know –’
‘See ya,’ the woman said, fluttering her fingers in a wave.
Amelia scuffed her feet as she walked away, holding shaking hands across her belly. The rag between her legs smelled of oil as she walked. A piece of bark worked its way free of her undies and sliced at the inside of her thigh. Lucy walked ahead, unable to keep the slow pace. She stopped and turned, waited for Amelia to catch up, but was soon ahead again.
Sweat gathered at Amelia’s hairline though she was suddenly very cold. She walked downhill, her feet slipping on the steep dirt road. Her insides flipped, pulsing beneath her fingers. The pulling pain multiplied and spread, punctuated by isolated wrenches that made her gasp.
She stopped to endure one of these attacks, turned to see if she was a peaceful distance from the house. The woman had followed her over the ridge, stood facing her in the middle of the driveway; she widened her stance, crossed her arms over her chest.
Amelia straightened her shoulders, turned around, and kept walking. She was registering all the items in her pack, everything she had left behind. She gripped her mother’s shopping list in her mind but she was already forgetting the angle of each letter, the amount of blank space between the edge of the page and the words, the exact place of the scribble her mother had made to bring the ailing pen back to life.
The track dipped and curved between dry paddocks afflicted with weeds. The sun bore into her scalp, finding strips of exposed skin where her hair parted. Her headache was sharp and insistent. At intervals along the way, she held her head in her hands and pushed hard, the pressure offering momentary relief. Beads of sweat dripped down her face and dried in stiff, salty lines on her cheeks. A haze on the horizon promised more heat.
Barbed wire fences stretched out on either side of the path and it was as if she were skewered on that metal, the spikes catching then ripping through her insides as she forged onwards. She curved over the pain, her arms crossed low and clutching at her sides.
The feeling of being watched persisted. The gum trees became Pops, their long branches his arms, his face pressing out from inside trunks. She stopped and turned suddenly, trying to catch him or any assailant off guard. The house looked down on her from a distance. From its windows, she could easily be tracked: a flare of colour and a small puff of dust as she dragged her feet beneath her.
She picked up a fallen branch in case she needed to defend herself, and used it to take some of her weight. Lucy pushed her dry muzzle into Amelia’s hand; her fur was hot, the darkness of it absorbing heat.
They walked, and the sun got higher, centring itself in the sky. Fence posts became both the passing of time and a measure of progress. She committed to a post in the distance, promised to make it there before resting. Each challenge she set for herself grew shorter and shorter till she only made it from one post to the next. Once there, she would bend over the post, head on her arms, with the roughness of the wood beneath her fingertips. A currawong followed her every move; it chose low branches from which to watch her pass, then flapped ahead to reach a vantage point further along the trail.
‘I’ve got nothing,’ she told it, her voice hoarse. The bird didn’t listen.
Flies formed a halo around her head. At first she swiped the air and blew them off her lips but as she weakened, she surrendered, carried them on her skin, imagined that maggots would hatch from her pores. Hives rose in clusters on the inside of her forearm and she spat on them, rubbed the saliva in. She tried not to scratch but the effort became too much. She attacked them with abandon; scabs dislodged and pus smeared with blood across her raised skin. The flies found new energy.
Her legs gave way before she reached the next post. She collapsed onto all fours, loose rocks cutting into her knees. She retched. The channel of her throat was narrow and dry. She heaved again, released a bitter string of pinkish bile. Each breath carried a moan she couldn’t control. Lucy approached and sniffed at the wetness around Amelia’s mouth.
Amelia crawled into the feeble shade of a tree. The ground sent heat up through her as she lay on it; a thistle leered over her, plucking at her T-shirt. She closed her eyes.
Amelia roused from a feverish vision of her mother. Her hands were lifted, palms open before her eyes; in her confusion, she had been trying to wash her face. She put her hands to her cheeks in case they were actually wet, in case there was water, in case her mother was really there, breathing in the next room. But her hands were dry, her cheeks hot and sweaty beneath them.
The scene began to taper away, so she closed her eyes and went back to the memory of the final moments, when she was beside her mother’s bed, keeping vigil; her mother was too small beneath the covers. Amelia hadn’t slept in days. Cushions from the couch were stacked up beneath her. Amelia stood, walked the few steps to the bathroom. Used the toilet, washed her face. Her hands were cool and damp against her cheeks as she crossed the hallway, which was dim with dawn light, and returned to her mother’s bedside.
It was in those moments of absence that her mother had died.
‘Mum?’ Her voice was a husk and yet it was too loud, clarifying her aloneness on the dirt. The sky was too lively a blue above her, the pressure from stones and twigs too sharp beneath her. She didn’t want this world; she closed her eyes, and in the red-tinged darkness her mother was a possibility again. She reached out as her mother swirled away, tugged her back, demanded her attention: there was something Amelia needed to tell her. Amelia brought forth a series of scenes and populated them with remembered detail, each of them holding solid after a decade. She lifted each one up for examination, as if she were a child holding out a drawing for her mother’s approval.
The first showed Zach unhooking her fingers from a drink of water, slowly, showed him watching her while he put his mouth on the glass. He handed it back to her, the ice clinking, and pointed to the place where his lips had been. ‘Drink,’ he said.
The next began with the bolts of his spine as he shovelled, the moment he caught her watching. The perfect stun of his closeness: a trap of skin, sweat, breath, hair.
Then, his hands removing seedlings from pots, planting roots in the holes she dug. The softness in his voice as he told her what she liked, the soil beneath her fingernails as he moved her hands around his body, teaching her.
Finally, by the back fence, behind the fig tree: the grass that she let grow long and wild after he was gone, weeds choking the climbers he planted, pulling down fence palings, letting light through.
She asked her mother: Do you see? This happened to me.
She cycled through again, slower this time, much slower.
It was early afternoon when she heard the rumble of a truck in the distance. She lay with her eyes closed, listened, unsure if the noise was real. There it was. Lucy lay on her side, legs straight, her tail thumping in scattered tree bark as Amelia sat up.
The highway became louder as she ran, legs unsteady, down the track. There was a new lightness to her movement, though her head pounded with each step, and white flecks skated across her sight. Lucy ran ahead, whipping around in excited circles.
The gate was there and she opened it, her hands remembering the movements from the night before.
‘Easy, Luce, easy,’ she said. Lucy went through the gate, then waited, panting, as Amelia closed it.
They stood where the highway met the dirt path. There was a tenderness to her abdomen, a memory of the earlier pain. A plastic bottle was tucked into grass beside the road. She went to it, unscrewed the lid and pressed the opening to her mouth. It was empty but she held it there hoping to coax out any lingering moisture.
She raised her thumb to the passing vehicles. A red car with bicycles balanced on its roof didn’t stop. A sunglasses-wearing man in a Corolla made no acknowledgement of her. A Commodore approached with pillows pressing against the windows, and the eyes of children stared at her out the back window as the car sped away. A sleek silver bullet of a car, a wobbly ute s
tacked with chairs and a desk, a livestock truck pushing the smell of shit-soaked animals against her: none of them stopped.
She counted the red cars, Sid’s colour. Each one became significant, likely to stop for her and take her to Sid’s door. She conjured him, then, his calm, the way she could meet his eye and hold it. The consistency of him in the days after her mother died, lying on his camping mat beside her bed, watching over her.
An orange kombi flashed its lights at her. Its engine altered and there was the crunch and rev of lowering gears as the van went past. Gravel popped beneath its wheels. The driver gave a quick toot of the horn, stopped with a skid. He bounced out of the door: a man in a leather waistcoat, chest bare.
‘Hey there,’ he yelled. He walked towards her, doing a big side-to-side wave, arm in the air. He let out a hoot, happy to be alive. She was rigid as he approached, taking in the plaited goatee, his billowing pants.
‘Hey,’ he said again. She raised her hand then let it fall. Lucy stepped forward, sniffed.
‘That dog friendly?’ the man said, pausing a few metres away.
‘Are you?’ Amelia said, breaking into a dry cough.
‘Ha! She’s all right!’ He yelled over his shoulder. Behind him, a woman slid from the van. She wore a long mauve dress, narrow straps over narrow shoulders. The woman stretched, two fists in the air. Her red hair shimmered, falling in a long, thick plait down her back. A man in a navy blue hat with a purple feather emerged too, lit a cigarette.
The waistcoated man approached Amelia with an extended hand. Lucy snuffled at his legs and Amelia held out her own limp hand.
‘Jesus, you’re a mess,’ the man said. ‘You all right?’ He took her hand and shook so vigorously that her arm pulled in its socket. ‘I’m Eddie,’ he said.
‘Any water?’ she said.
‘You got no water?’ He looked her over with his hands on his hips, the hair in his underarms wet and hanging in strings. She blocked the sun with her hand and looked up at him; his eyes were vivid green and bloodshot.
‘Well, shit,’ he said. ‘Come on.’ He beckoned her with a scoop of his arm, then turned on his bare heel. She walked behind his long strides, followed the tinkling of his anklets. From the shade of a tree, the man in the navy blue hat nodded towards her and she nodded back. The red-haired woman squinted in her direction, then claimed the cigarette from the lips of the man in the hat. Lucy approached them and the man in the hat crouched to meet her; she walked straight past him.
Bedcovers with a rainbow print leaked out of the side door of the van. Eddie handed her a bottle personalised with cartoon stickers and permanent-marker figurines. The water was fusty and she gulped it down, catching drips from her chin and licking her fingers. She called Lucy over and she drank from Amelia’s hand.
‘You got any more?’ Amelia said.
‘There’s more in the van, I think. We’ll get ya sorted.’ Eddie ushered over the two smokers. ‘This is the band, Sven and Clare.’
‘How do you do,’ Sven said, a European accent curling around his words. Clare’s crossed arms and narrowed eyes indicated that picking Amelia up had not been her idea.
‘What’s your name?’ Eddie said.
‘Amelia. That’s Lucy.’
‘Right, Amelia, do you know how to drive?’ Eddie said.
‘Yeah,’ Amelia said. ‘Why?’ A cramp tightened beneath her shorts and she twitched, but did not wince.
‘’Cos we want you to drive,’ Clare said. ‘Obviously.’
‘Go easy, jeez,’ Eddie said, giving Amelia a wink. ‘These losers don’t know how to drive, you see.’ Clare shoulder barged him but he was unaffected, keeping his eyes on Amelia.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Amelia said. ‘I’m not really feeling right … and I’ve never driven a van.’
Clare dragged on the cigarette, lowered it to her side between two fingers. ‘We need a driver, not a passenger,’ she said. She piled her hair on top of her head, a few strands remaining stuck to her neck. ‘Eddie’s tired.’
Amelia took a deep, secret breath. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Melbourne,’ Sven said.
‘The big smoke!’ Eddie yelled, then hooted. Lucy walked over, blinked slowly. Keys came flying towards Amelia and she let them fall to the ground.
‘That’s the spirit,’ Eddie said, then disappeared into the back of the van.
‘Do you mind?’ Sven said, eyes pale and serious, the blond hairs of his top lip caught in the sunlight.
‘She’s fine,’ Clare said, slinking into the back of the van behind Eddie.
Amelia bent to pick up the keys. She stood up too quickly, leaned against the kombi’s metal as her head spun. The others were laughing from within the van.
This is it.
She walked around the front of the van and pulled herself up behind the wheel. The van smelled of old cigarettes. Springs stuck into her through the seat. She pictured the stains she’d make on the material, the blood she was leaving behind her: a trail to Sid’s door.
Her fingers sank into something wet and spongy as she adjusted her seat. Sven sat in the passenger seat beside her and Lucy squeezed into the footwell in front of him. Sven handed over a bottle of Mount Franklin. ‘Drink as much as you want.’
‘Do you have any painkillers?’ Amelia said. She held a sip of water in her mouth, let it trickle down her throat.
‘Clare?’ Sven said. There was a rustle, then a metal packet flew between the front seats. Sven popped out two pills and Amelia held her hand out; dirt darkened the lines in her palm. She threw the pills in her mouth and swallowed more water, tracked the gurgle of it as it moved through her.
The van puttered out onto the highway. Its sides trembled as she reached the height of each gear, and by the time the speedometer hit one hundred, the whole thing threatened to dismantle. The rag was squishy between her legs, fresh blood wet and warm; the earthy smell of herself escaped each time she moved.
Sven was quiet and he let Lucy rest her head in his lap. Clare and Eddie giggled from the back seat, and it was only a matter of minutes before laughter turned into murmurs and kissing sounds. Eddie moaned and Clare shushed him; there was a flicker of movement in the rear-vision mirror, a flash of skin, an arched back, then Clare’s arm emerged and yanked a mustard-coloured curtain across.
Amelia watched the road with quick glances to Sven; he was stony and stared out his window even as Eddie’s muffled groans were matched by Clare’s higher-pitched panting. As a sign stated there were three hundred and fifty-two kilometres to Melbourne, the slap of skin on skin was sharp and steady.
Amelia gripped the sticky wheel, listened. Clare’s gasps were filled with a pleasure Amelia had never known.
The kilometres passed in a blur; she drove and couldn’t recall anything she’d seen for stretches of time. The painkillers kicked in and softened the edges of her cramps. The passengers all fell asleep. She fell asleep, too, and was woken by the wheels bumping over markers on the side of the highway. She corrected with a jolt; Sven woke up, looked around, then went back to sleep.
Aeroplanes gave the city away; they circled and swooped, or escaped in straight, sure lines. The late-afternoon heat brewed with exhaust fumes and was channelled between lanes of traffic. Amelia negotiated tailgating, speeding and unpredictable cars as they headed towards the claustrophobia of the impending city; it rose in glimpses as she rounded bends in the road, black and grey buildings piercing the sky, swallowing the light.
Amelia slowed the van to a stop behind lines of blocked traffic. The van sputtered as it idled and was slow to respond when she accelerated, creeping forward in the queue. The sleepers stirred. Lucy’s tail thumped against the floor as Sven woke up. He inhaled deeply and stretched, cracking his back from side to side. Eddie opened the curtains over the back seat and poked his head out, hair at angles, pillow marks up one cheek. He gave her a thumbs-up.
‘Nice job,’ he said.
She waited for Clare to re
veal herself and was surprised when she popped up, radiant, her eyes bright and clear. There was no evidence of invasion. Clare rubbed her nose with the palm of her hand, put her slender feet up on the back of the seat, completely unmoved.
They crept along, bumper to bumper. Amelia put her window down, let in the hot, metallic wind of traffic. Grit caught in the hairs on her arms. A plastic bag bashed itself against the cement road barrier, finally finding its way over and under the wheels of oncoming vehicles.
An ambulance picked its way through the grid of traffic behind them; cars turned at angles and squeezed together to let it through, metal tickling metal. She struggled to manoeuvre the van, bunny hopping towards a taxi; the siren screamed and the ambulance stopped right on her tail, unable to fit past. It tooted its horn, red and blue lights colouring the van’s interior.
‘You gotta move up,’ Clare said. ‘You’re blocking it.’
The taxi edged forward and Amelia followed suit. The ambulance workers shook their heads and glared at her as they moved past, only centimetres between them. Lucy cowered at Sven’s feet, her ears pinned back on her head.
The siren rang in Amelia’s ears well after it was gone. Eddie knelt on the seat and his top half disappeared out the window. ‘That shit doesn’t look good,’ he said, bending in from outside.
‘What is it?’ Clare said, her face to the glass.
‘There’s a truck that’s lost its trailer … looks like it spilled boxes of fruit,’ he said. ‘A car’s wedged under the side of it, totally squashed.’ He pulled himself in and dropped back onto the seat. ‘Shit,’ he said.
The faces of the surrounding drivers were defeated: a woman all done-up, a turquoise hat balanced on the side of her head; a man tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, pushing up in his seat to look ahead for better options. He took a gamble, flicked on an indicator to move to the next lane of halted traffic.
Sirens converged, seeming to come from every direction. Amelia wiped her upper lip. Her thighs were sweaty. She was jittery, the city closing in on her. She scanned for escape routes; the best option was the nature strip a hundred metres down the road. She and Lucy could bolt, make a run for it before they entered the tunnel and were trapped.