26
On that first day Leon didn’t stop the car for anything, not until his bladder ached in his back and his eyes began to close with the sting of squinting out the sun. The sky was a dome of white and the road was black and red. There were other cars, but not so many that he had to slow down, there was always space up ahead. As the first greens of evening streaked the sky, he rolled into a motel and crawled into bed without showering.
In the morning he was woken by thumping on the door. The small woman he’d paid for the room the night before stood there in her cleaning smock. She looked him up and down before speaking. ‘Well, I thought you were dead. Anyhow, you’ve slept past twelve, so that’s two night’s board, and you’ve missed breakfast, but breakfast is included, so you can stay tonight and I’ll slip you an extra egg in the morning.’
Blearily, he found his trousers and went to settle up the bill. When he handed over the money, he saw that his knuckles were sunburnt from where he’d held the steering wheel. The woman stood behind the counter and had taken off the cleaning smock. Now she wore a sort of blazer and cat-eye spectacles at the end of her nose. She counted out his money, glancing at him with every stroke, like he might try to back out of the deal. ‘That’s all there, then,’ she said, suddenly flavoured with smiles. He headed back to his room to take a shower. On the way he saw the sign hung next to the vacancy notice, NO VETS and in smaller writing like a whispered threat, WE DON’T GIVE BEDS TO MURDERERS. He didn’t have the energy to do much, so he took the smudgy yellow towel and one of the pillows, tried to leave the room in a mess, but short of throwing the blankets on the floor there wasn’t much to move about.
He drove inland, sleeping in the back of his car at night. It was just as comfortable as a room, he could pull over wherever he liked and it was free. He passed through places with names from another language, where the people nodded to him as if they knew who he was. He raced emus along the open, empty roads and stopped to sit on the roof of the car and watch the sun set. Sometimes he passed only three cars a day. He went through places where everything was canned – canned peaches, canned ham, canned milk and eggs. He visited a banana plantation where he stopped for a milkshake and the thing came in a vase as big as his head. Cold bananas were good. It made him think of the shop, about a seating arrangement inside, where people could pop in and order ice cream and coffee, a Milo Sunday, malted milk and a slice of gingerbread. He looked forward to stopping at these little places, where people looked at your car, not recognising it, where they asked him where he was headed, not where he had been. Further inland these places became rare, and he stopped at each one and filled up on water and fuel, and had an ice cream frozen on to a stick, which he had become partial to. The daytimes were always good.
He’d been on his own a month when the sleepwalking started. The first time it happened he had stretched out in the back of the car, stupefied by the stars. Patterns trailed across his eyes, and he fell asleep deeply and quickly. Then bam. He was out in the open, in the nick, loudly spoken words attached to some dream dying in his mouth. That first time he was only a few steps from the car and he chuckled himself back to sleep, shaking off the panic that had first gripped him, the feeling that he had to get back to the car, or some sand shark would swallow him up. But over the next few weeks things got more serious. One night it was his own voice that woke him up, a bark that echoed back to him three times before he was left in silence again, the car nowhere in sight.
‘Jesus H Christ,’ he said to cover the wild chug of his heart and to fill the empty space. Insects chirruped in the air around him. A frogmouth croaked but there were no trees to be seen. Something bounded off to his right – it could have been a wallaby. Jesus, it would have been easy to wander out into the road. The car turned out to be disguised by a shrub of pigface and with the light of the moon it wasn’t too long before he was back on his safety raft. He locked the doors and lay awake the rest of the night.
Then, a few nights later, he awoke to himself speaking: ‘After the wind, an earthquake . . .’ and felt for a moment that he would carry on the sentence, as if he knew what he was talking about. He stayed still and opened his eyes, then tried to open them again, before he realised that there were no stars or moon, and the place was black as though he’d been buried. He stretched his fingers in the dark, was aware of no movement. He was back on the black road, a gun in his face, the thing in the space next to him, breathing wetly. The desert was silent, no croon of insects, no nightbirds, just his own breath and heart, and he stayed still for a long time, waiting for someone to shoot him. He crouched low to the ground, picked up a handful of dirt, stood up again, clutching it hotly. Something watched, he could feel it in the dark, the terrible mute animal with big eyes and long fingers. He could smell its mud breath.
I don’t know what to do, he thought and a comet crash-landed on the earth, except it wasn’t a comet, it was a road train, and it wasn’t crashing it was passing by, and the air was filled with noise and light, and in that light he saw his car, silhouetted against the brightness of the headlights, and as he turned towards it he caught sight of what was standing before him.
He drove for the rest of the night, pulled on a jumper to quell the shake of his bones and drove not fast or slow, watching for anything that might jump out into the road, looking in his rear-view mirror at the dark behind him.
It was just past nine when the fuel ran out. Already the sun was hot on Leon’s knuckles gripping the steering wheel. The spare can was empty when he’d been sure it was full. The drinking water was gone as well and he could not remember doing that. He’d filled it at the drinking fountain at Cobar. The woman from the caravan park had come out, with her hair parted in the middle, and her T-shirt that read GIRLS SAY YES TO BOYS WHO SAY NO. STAY OUT OF VIETNAM and he’d imagined running her head under the tap, holding open her eyes and her mouth, making her see. But then he’d shaken his head and it was back to normal.
‘Right on,’ she’d said when he told her he was headed into the desert. ‘Right on, baby.’ And he’d started the engine and driven away.
The map showed nothing, just the long black line of a road cutting through all that desert, straight as a pin. A night’s drive from where he had last stopped. Up ahead was Quilpie, but that was a full thumb’s stretch north. You were supposed to wait, so he walked in circles round the car, standing tall to try to see over the desert to where someone might wave back at him. Far in the distance was low-lying scrub, a black line on the horizon. Past that all was heat wobble. Cicadas hissed in the brown grasses.
He took out his sleeping roll and laid it over the back window to block out the sun. All the doors were open as wide as they would go but the air didn’t move. It cooked itself on the dashboard and became sweet and hot, and he tried passing the time by opening up one of the books he’d brought with him, but Sherlock Holmes did not stick and he let the book rest coolly on his forehead, smelling the stale moths of the bookshelf at home and trying not to get angry.
His tongue lost the feel of sandpaper and became a small brick in his mouth. Syrup from a can of peaches wetted his lips, but the sweetness got at his thirst and he chewed the peach halves, sifting them through his teeth to try to get all the juice out. When the sun was high and the inside of the car was too much, he lay underneath and wondered what bits of the engine would hold the cleanest water, recited the names of the stations, in order, of the West Central line. A couple of parrots sang out on their way somewhere cooler. Sometimes there was a thump through the ground – a kangaroo, a footfall – but it may only have been the blood in his ears. Sleep came, quick and unexpected, so that he woke suddenly with the feeling that something had changed. The sun had moved and seen to his ankles and shins on its way: they felt burnt and bloody, and they were big and red as peeled plums. With his eyes closed he waited to get used to it, to know that the pain wasn’t going away. His throat was swollen like he’d swallowed an unripe peach.
The sun didn’t burn any more, but sent low rays and long shadows out over the ground. The road was just as long and straight and empty as it had been before he fell asleep, the sand and grass and dirt were the same, deeper in colour from the lowering sun. He opened the bonnet of the car and studied the radiator. You could drink that. It was just water. He stood right over it and saw it shine back at him, put a finger down but his finger was not long enough to touch. There would be no getting it out anyway. He closed the bonnet.
As the sun set, he clambered on to the roof to sit and watch night approaching like a cloud bank. He tried to think of what had brought him out there. Someone would come – there were telegraph poles for Chrissake. They stretched over the red hip bone of the landscape, a measure of how big the space was. The furthest one he could see was a hairline in the distance.
Perhaps, in the dark, it would be easier to spot help. He could flash his headlights on and off a few times, see if it brought anything. But once the dark had settled he felt differently. There were no stars, nothing to see past the nose of the car, and it gave him the creeps. In the far distance a gun was fired, and the noise brought an old heat to his palms and his arms twitched, thinking of the kick of it. His heart beat, steady and loud, and he bit his lips in case he’d imagined it. In the blackness something padded softly round the car. He found his hammer in the boot and repositioned himself back on the roof, the hammer resting heavy and cold across his burnt ankles. The gun sounded again and this time he saw a spark up ahead, far away, but still there. There was something that sounded like laughter in the big space. He felt better. The thing in the dark was most likely a dingo.
It was cold, now, like some bastard was playing a joke, but he didn’t get back inside the car. It was good on the sunburn. What was there to shoot at out there? Kangeroos, he supposed, dingoes, like the one that had passed by the car. When the desert had been silent for hours, something howled far away, one voice on its own, unanswered. He closed his eyes and lay flat, and waited for the cold night to pass.
In first pale lights of dawn Leon slid off the roof and carefully laced his boots, tying them tight over his sunburnt ankles to stop them from rubbing. He put a shirt over his head for shade. In another shirt he packed the remaining tins of peaches, resisting the urge to open one immediately to have the wetness of syrup in him. He looked at the keys in his hand for a moment, then locked the car and began to walk in the direction of the shooting.
Once the car became a spot in the distance, then disappeared behind a swell of heatwaves, he had the feeling that he was stuck on the same patch of desert, that there was a cunningly hidden conveyor belt that he walked against, keeping him in the same spot. His ankles were wet in his boots and he gritted his teeth against the steady shearing of his skin. By the time the sun was fully up the peaches were heavy and his lips were biscuit dry. He took a can and held it in front of him. He held it in front of him for a long time, until the fact had completely sunk in that he had forgotten to take the can opener. He could picture it sitting on the dashboard becoming red hot in the sun. He held the can a little longer, then hurled it as hard as he could along the road. It didn’t go very far, and for a few moments he gathered himself by placing a hand over his eyes and blinking grittily. He picked it up again as he walked past it and noted that it was unscratched. He dropped the peaches out of his shirt and tied it round his waist without breaking stride.