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He opened the corrugated metal door that was cut into the roller. Sunlight washed in around him making him disappear in the burst of white for a moment, until he came back in as a phantomy silhouette. The Greg silhouette pointed at my car, which waited in the centre of the workshop.

‘For a start, the chassis will probably fall in on itself. B – water will get into the panelling. And three – it's so rusted out to begin with, the roof's probably the only thing holding it together.'

I tried a horror voice as I went towards the car. ‘That's what they said to Doctor Frankenstein
and
Furter. That's what they said to Tim Burton.
And
James Cameron, three times. Tonight, I make history!' I tried a maniacal laugh. It sounded good in the tin shed.

I punched Greg's boom box where I'd put a Coldplay CD.
Parachutes.

My car is a 1969 Falcon Valiant Regal VF. It is a very dull green. I like that it's a car that is double my age. I like that it is battered enough for me not to worry about it in the city at night. I love the bench seat in the front and the two strip lights on either side of the hood. The new dent and scrape from the freeway add perhaps too much character, but that can be up for discussion.

I put the flame against the back strut until it glowed red, then hit the cutting lever. The paint flamed with thick black smoke as the metal sliced and melted and stank. Sparks poured out, scattering inside the car and dying on the workshop floor.

I flicked off one of the heavy gloves and got a smoke and held it
into the tip of the flame. At one point the rear window exploded when it got too hot. After that I wound down the front windows before cutting through the other struts. A thousand pieces of broken glass reflected the blues and whites of the flame. I was careful around the front windscreen, cutting back about five or six centimetres into the roof. I crawled inside and teased out the ceiling light and wiring before I took the roof off completely.

Coldplay was the soundtrack as I worked. It had seemed perfect for how I felt. All those break-up songs. Sad bastard. But some pretty neat song titles too. ‘Sparks'. ‘Yellow'. ‘High Speed'. I thrashed the one album all afternoon and evening as I cut up my car. The last song on the album is ‘Everything's Not Lost'.

I turned on the bedroom light and went to the wardrobe and started stuffing clothes into my pack.

Robin sat up in bed. ‘What are you doing?'

‘Get up. Get dressed.'

I grabbed our sleeping bags and my pack and the rifle.

‘What's happening?'

‘Oh, and grab a jumper. It's colder than you think.'

I had a box of stuff ready on the kitchen table and I'd piled more stuff on the path ready to put in the boot. Food and toilet paper and two flagons of wine.

She came down the stairs in a jumper and skirt. ‘It's two a.m.'

I grabbed a CD I'd chosen and raced out the front door so I could be ready when she came out. I jumped onto the back seat and over into the front and put the CD in the car stereo. I unlatched the passenger door, put on my Wayfarers and lounged back. That's how she found me, in my convertible.

She laughed, short but right. ‘It's good,' she said. ‘It's very, very good.'

The cutting was rough and there were bits of glass still on the back seat, but it did look like the real thing, not so much convertible as roofless.

I kicked my foot out so her door swung open towards her. ‘Your pumpkin awaits.'

‘Where's the ball?'

‘Kal. Kal-flamin'-goorlie.'

She got it. She nodded. Then she looked doubtfully at the pile of provisions.

‘Camping,' I said.

She kicked at the rifle.

I tried a southern accent, ‘An' a huntin' an' a fishin'.'

‘Yeah, well good luck with fishing. You know it's in the middle of the desert, right?' She was smiling.

I pushed the play on the car CD to clinch it. Bo Diddley's ‘Tonight is Ours'. It wasn't one of his pared back blues numbers. It was lush, romantic and nostalgic. He had back-up singers. A crowd.

She was still smiling but started to shake her head. ‘Tomorrow.'

With Robin, you can never tell which way she might go. ‘You're not listening to the song.' I pushed my sunglasses up and worked my eyebrows, letting the car and Bo Diddley do the work.

‘Okay,' she said.

‘All right!'

‘I'll get the invoice. That's the whole...' She finished the sentence with a shrug and went back inside the house.

I put the stuff in the boot and we drove out of town.

Robin didn't say anything until we stopped at some traffic lights in Midland. It is surprisingly hard to talk when the wind is ripping around you. She lit a cigarette and let the smoke trail out and put it in my mouth and said,
‘Badlands
or
Thelma & Louise?'

‘Badlands?
I never thought of
Badlands.
That's good. I was thinking
Something Wild.'

Robin smiled, but then looked doubtful. She said, ‘Am I the boring guy in need of the makeover or the psycho jealous ex-husband?'

Before I could answer, a Lancer pulled up next to us with three or four revheads leering out at my wheels. The driver gunned his motor.

I took my foot off the brake and touched the accelerator and eased off slowly through the red light, leaving them frozen at the line.

‘Fresh air. Unobstructed view. The wind in our hair. An open road ahead,' I said. ‘God, I love this country.'

‘Which country?' she said, taking the cigarette out of my mouth.
Then she looked forward and yelled into the night, ‘We're on a mission from God.'

‘Which god?' I yelled back.

It was hard to hear Bo, even with the volume cranked up. I like the end of this one where he gets the crowd to yell back ‘Have mercy' and ‘Amen' while the guitar and drums go slower and slower, like it is late and couples are swaying on the dance floor without moving their feet in the 1950s or dancing in the church, maybe, and the band is going to keep playing.

It was a long drive. Longer in the night. Longer when your old car won't do more than eighty. I drove along with the silver pipeline that takes the water from Perth to Kalgoorlie. Sometimes it was on the left, then on the right. Sometimes it was way off on top of a paddock, then gone, then right up next to the car. Robin slept, curled up like a kitten on the seat out of the wind. I had a joint. At Southern Cross, the farms suddenly ran out and became scrub. I drank some wine. The pipeline crossed under the road. The petrol was getting low. The air was freezing as it scrambled around my throat.

The sky finally started to get lighter ahead as we came near Coolgardie, thirty K short of Kalgoorlie. Robin woke as both our mobiles chimed into range. She tapped me on the shoulder and pointed off to the side of the highway to the cemetery.

The earth was red. Red sand on red gravel on red rock with the occasional wink of white quartz. The scrubby gum trees were white like the stone of the graves. Plastic flowers. Ants. It looked like an abandoned cemetery, like it was halfway through being blown away.

The Valiant was the only car in the parking area and we were the only people in the cemetery.

The headstone said:
Rest in Eternal Peace. Wife of Bill. Loved mother of Robin, Elizabeth, Gail.

Robin had the invoice out. She waved it at the grave. ‘Well, old Jack does have a point,' she said brightly. ‘One gravestone, delivered as ordered. No wriggling out of that. You pay your money, you can say what you want. Kind of difficult for old Jack to repossess the thing if
we don't sort this out, mind you.'

There were real flowers, two limp bunches.

Robin must have seen me look at them because she said, ‘The flowers would be Gail and Liz. Drive down from Kal to do the right thing. Busy, busy, busy. Two perfect girls.'

When I looked at her, she looked away. I said, ‘You had an exam on and no money. How could you have got up? Remember, we...'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘What I mean is that if you were feeling–'

‘Feeling what? What “should” I have been feeling?'

I didn't have an answer.

She said, ‘I was thinking about my mother and how she was sick and she died.'

‘I didn't mean...'

‘Is that all right with you? If I was thinking what I was thinking, and not what you want me to be thinking?'

‘I was just trying ... to make you feel better, I guess.'

She turned and walked back towards the car. Strode. She strode away.

We kept driving towards Kalgoorlie, in silence for a while. Then I said, ‘Want to tell me?'

‘What?'

‘Anything ... about anything that you want.'

She pointed at the fuel gauge and then at a petrol station up ahead. ‘We need petrol.'

The night she heard her mother had died, she was quiet. We drank a bottle of vodka and we fucked. With gusto. I'm pretty sure that was the last time.

The petrol station looked closed. One petrol pump; a large corrugated iron workshop; a wooden office, that doubled as a shop if the old metal Coke sign was still true.

The petrol pump had levers.

‘I'll do that, mate.'

His skin was red and his big belly pushed out under his dirty
t-shirt. The top half of his overalls hung down behind like a spare pair of monkey arms.

I said, ‘I've seen these. I think it was in
The Postman Always Rings Twice.'

‘It's not new but it works.' Then he looked over at the car. He bent and looked at my rough cuts, his eyes narrowing like a wine snob. ‘Up from Perth?'

‘Sydney,' I said.

‘Sydney!' he said, frozen in amazement with the nozzle halfway to the car.

‘Yep. Drove from Sydney. Going back.'

I'd pushed it too far. He looked from Robin who wasn't being part of it and then to the car, weighing it all up for the bullshit it was.

That's when I said, ‘Hawaii.'

‘Huh?'

‘Drove from Hawaii before that.'

‘How much?' he asked.

‘Fill 'er up thanks,' I said, with the biggest smile, then turned and went to the shop. I hate customers like me.

The shop was amazing. Old pie signs and basketball singlets mixed with car deodorant trees and bad hats. There were car parts including a muffler suspended from the ceiling. There were maps and prospecting pans. A sign said
You are in the Golden Mile.
Another said
Coolgardie Since 1892.

I tried on some of the bad hats. I liked the canvas one with the big orange star pattern and the little mirrors in the middle of each star. Then I found the flowers. Maybe they weren't flowers. It could have been a feather duster. But it looked like a bunch of multicoloured flowers made out of feathers.

I was about to take them out to her, when I patted my back pocket for my wallet.

The petrol guy was hanging up the petrol nozzle. I watched him as he walked slowly from the pump and into the shop. It looked like he had a bad back. He said, ‘Sixty-seven dollars forty-three cents. It's as full as it can be.'

I didn't doubt it.

‘Anything else, sir,' he said in a way I do when I'm dealing with an arsehole.

‘Yep. A packet of – not the Longbeach. B&H. And two Snickers. How much are these flowers, dude?'

‘Twelve.'

‘Yes.'

‘Ninety-four dollars. Do you want the hat?'

‘Oh. Um, but of course. I'll, um, get my wallet from the car.' Big smile. I went out of the door slowly, but not so slowly it wasn't casual.

Robin looked up at me and I pushed the hat forward over my eyes and said in my practised bad Mexican accent, ‘Eese that you, Cisco?'

‘Bad hat,' she said, not meaning it.

I lifted my sunglasses so she could see my eyes and pulled out the flowers from behind my back. ‘And for the señorita.'

That got her. She looked at them and smiled and then I thought she was going to cry. ‘Gracias, señor.' And I thought I was going to cry. Then she flicked her eyes over my shoulder.

I turned to see him standing outside the shop, two of his four arms folded. I waved. Turned back.

She saw something about it all and looked doubtful. Just a flash.

It was enough. I would do this. What a laugh. I readjusted my sunnies and went to the boot and kicked it in the spot. Up it came to reveal the rifle sitting on top of our stuff. I looked up and he was still waiting. I smiled again. Then reached in like it might be my wallet.

That's when the Ford Territory drove in. Mum, Dad and two kids. Holiday gear up to the roof.

The petrol guy went to them smiling, but it was as if he had two independent eyes, like an ant's antennas. He was watching me with his left eyeball.

One of the kids was watching me too. A chubby girl with big round glasses, straight out of
Little Miss Sunshine.

I closed the boot before anyone could see and went to Robin. ‘How much money you got?'

She looked at me. She knew.

I tried to make a smile but couldn't get it going.

She opened her purse, flicked past her savings card which I knew
was empty and went into the money. A ten-dollar note. And coins. ‘Ten. Um sixteen ... seventeen and about sixty cents. I didn't know we were doing this Zac, or I would have brought some.'

I looked up to where he was giving directions while he watched me.

‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.'

I went into the back, pushing broken glass off the seat. I pulled it up. I said, ‘Check in the glove box.'

There were coins under the seat. More two-dollar coins. Four dollars.

‘How much do we need?' she asked, not looking at me.

‘A hundred.'

She shook her head going through the glove box.

I checked in my jeans pockets. Bingo. Cash. Lots of it in my left pocket. Fives. Four scrunched up five-dollar notes. ‘Fuck, fuck, shit.'