Tide (19 page)

Sorry? he said.

Which movie were you going to see?

He fixed me with his burning green eyes. It was as if he suddenly ‘got' me, but cast it down to that centre of the earth I so feared. And there it would stay. He said, so clinically, It doesn't matter which movie.

His wife and I had worked together on the local newspaper. Occasional amateur reporters. And now I had to write up her death. Killed in a car accident. Driving at night along Refuge Road, she hit a large pothole formed by recent heavy rain, veered off into the culvert and rolled her car. ‘Died instantly.'

That was the draft. I couldn't write it that way. It would sound less like an accident, more like her own doing. She must have been driving at a fair speed to have done that. But panic had set in – maybe she'd realised her mistake and was rushing back to the main road, to move on to the mutually-agreed-upon sammy, the True Sammy. But she never believed it was, I am sure. I
am
sure. She loved him, no doubt. She said to me, I miss him every minute I am not with him. She worried about his drinking. She didn't like cut-outs. It always upset him, she said, when the young blokes made remarks about me – you know I've taught many of them over the years. School-teacher fantasy stuff. She wasn't flattering herself. She was a beauty. Hot! they'd say. A handsome couple.

I wanted to write another article – maybe for an issue in six months' time. No connection. About trees and their names. About telling salmon gums and powderbark wandoos apart. You find both in the district. But the uptight ex-city editor on his ‘tree change' adventure would never take it; he'd only say, What kind of fool can't tell them apart? They look nothing like each other. I know he'd say that – he's that kind of man.

A LONG STRETCH OF NOTHING IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

It's a long stretch of nowhere, some say. We drive that way once a week. An hour's drive and we only see two farmhouses. You tend to sit above the speed limit because you see no reason not to. Even the cops drive faster along there. The trees have been stripped from the long paddock, and the regular paddocks are bare and saline. Only at the entries to both driveways are there a few trees, and these struggle. And there's a half-hour's drive between the two. A long stretch of nothing in the middle of nowhere. Everyone says so.

We're hurtling along the road that's a long stretch of nothing in the middle of nowhere, with the stereo up loud. We're listening to the new Megadeth album. The sky is heavy and a storm is expected in the afternoon. It's low ground, and the road often goes under the wash, but storms around here don't usually last long. We are glad we'll be there and back before it hits. An hour there, three hours in town, then an hour back. All done by three o'clock. It looks like the apocalypse, I say, and L comes back with, Yes, mutually assured destruction. After fifteen years of marriage, we don't really laugh at the grimness of each other's jokes, but just nod and accept them.

We are approaching the crossover of the second farmhouse on our route – bitumen to gravel, then about 500 metres before the house and farm sheds. The house is an old colonial mansion, though a little run down now. The machinery, mostly out of the sheds which are being used to hold every bit of hay that can be crammed in, is past its prime. Like many farms in the district, this one is clearly just managing to hold its head above the salt and the drought and the occasional storms and the worryingly low grain prices. In a paddock by the house, some sheep are milling – we always remark that they have the look of either pets or killers about them.

We are almost on top of the scraggly and half-dead trees by the gate when L screams – and I mean screams so loud, Megadeth pales by comparison. Stop stop stop! I hit the brakes and the tyres scream as I struggle to keep them on the road. I see it as the car wobbles and pulls to the left, to the tattered bitumen and gravel road's edge where life can change so quickly if the tyres grip in the wrong way, or fail to grip at all. Watch out! Watch out!

I quickly jerk the wheel to pull the car away from the rough edge, and careen into where the oncoming traffic would be, if there were any. The car fishtails and judders to a halt. To compound the implosion of sense, an oncoming car
does
appear and, seeing me and the toddler wandering down the middle of the road, slows and pulls over without too much drama. Within split seconds, our sense of what is what in the world has changed in multiple ways. L and I leap out of our car, as the bloke from his. As we all dash towards the toddler now standing in the middle of the road, we all exclaim at once – What on earth is he doing here!

The child with wispy blond hair is laughing hysterically and running for her life, out into the middle of nowhere from nowhere. My wife calls to me and the other bloke, Stop, stop running after her! Let her settle. We slow down and the child slows down. For some reason I am still not sure of, I stop entirely and the other bloke stops stock-still as well. He and I stand shoulder to shoulder as L walks slowly up to the toddler, who is crying, takes her by the hand, and directs her to the gravel shoulder of the road. Phew, mate, the other bloke said. Unbelievable. Yeah, I nearly cleaned her up. Never seen anyone on the road out here before, let alone a kid, the other bloke says. The toddler looks at the other bloke, then at me, then points at the other bloke, then at me, then back at the other bloke and bursts out crying. L scoops the child up into her arms and rocks her back and forth.

The toddler settles a little and L comforts her, as I swap a few words with the other bloke. I feel overwhelmed by him for some reason – as if he is my soul mate, my brother-inarms. I feel a kinship in that weird moment. The kid must have come from that house, we seem to all say at once, as if the bloody obvious will bring some relief to the tension. We peer down the driveway and can't see anything or anyone but the sheep. My wife says, She stepped out from behind those trees. Better walk her down to the house.

The other bloke looks suddenly agitated, almost nervous, and moves slowly back a little towards his car. Would you mind, the bloke says, would you mind looking after it all from here? Not much more I can do.

No, not at all … of course we can look after it from here, my wife says. The bloke flicks a quick look in the house's direction, then back at the child, and returns to his car, saying, I mean, they might get the wrong idea, you know, the kid's parents. Whitefellas don't want to understand blackfellas out here. Some of these farmers are real rednecks.

We leave it at that, and reassure him again that we'll sort it, waving goodbye as he drives off. The toddler is restless, so L puts her down. Immediately she tries to make for the driveway, so we cage her in from the road and let her lead the way.

My wife says over her shoulder that she'll take the long trek, and it'll be better for me to sort the car out and then follow them up the drive. So I do that, keeping the car 10 metres behind at less than a snail's pace. The toddler seems happy and marches on, chortling as she goes. L and the child have almost reached the verandah steps of the big house when a woman appears at the open front door. The woman surveys the scene, calmly walks out and down the stairs, takes the child's hand, says ‘thank you' and ushers her back up the stairs. Then the woman turns back and says to my wife, It'll storm this evening. Then she makes her way inside and closes the door.

Continuing our drive, disturbed and shaken and silent, we stare hard at the road – suddenly so full of nowhere. Eventually L says, Did you see the mother's eyes? She just stared as if we weren't even there, as if nothing had happened. I add my two cents' worth: She looked as if she was on prescription pills. This annoys L – I don't think so, she says almost bitterly. You're always so judgemental. More like distressed, as if she'd lost the plot and given in. I'm sure there's a real sad story behind that face.

On the return drive, coming back from town hours later, we slow right down as we approach that house, just in case, but there is no sign of life at all. And in the weeks that follow, we always slow down when we go past, but although the machinery has been moved and the hay stack has got smaller, we see no sign of any living thing other than sheep in the paddock.

Now, two months later, we're driving the nowhere road which has become the ‘action road' where anything is possible and conversation and silence work intently and intensely hand in hand, and the stereo is never played as it can only form a distraction from our expectations of what might happen. We slowly approach the second farmhouse and notice a
For Sale
sign out front. Actually, three signs. The property is multi-listed and the owners are obviously very keen to sell.

We start conjecturing and can't stop. It's as if two months of suppression, of pregnant pauses and apprehension, have broken like the storm later on that disturbing day. It had been a storm to remember. Something must have happened to the child … the woman, I say. Maybe the child wandered off and got bitten by a snake. Maybe it got hit by a car. No, no … we would have heard, there would have been signs, like the mess a bad storm leaves behind – debris on the road, trees down. Maybe the mother cracked up, or had already cracked up. One of us says that – we're both thinking it. We reach a fever pitch of conjecture then drop it and don't mention it again for ages.

In the weird way that time changes in these parts – going faster and slower at different times of the year, and at different speeds for different people – we find ourselves conjecturing again as we're driving that road. We slow down as always and then L cries, Look, the
For Sale
signs have gone! It's as if something has shifted in our lives. This has again become the road that's a long stretch of nothing in the middle of nowhere. The potential for action has passed. The mother and child are gone from there.

It's as if a load has been lifted from our shoulders. We relax. Even our breathing synchronises. I flip the car stereo. It has been a long time since we've played music on that road. The new AC/DC album. They still rock!

FALLING

It's easy to say there's not a lot to do during the long summer holiday, especially in a mining town too far from the coast to make it a day trip, but it's a fact. Clichés have reasons for existing and usually make sense.

If the kids don't go away to the coast for a few weeks with their parents, they spend their time watching television, playing pool or table tennis in the town hall – which doubles as a youth drop-in centre – or walking up and down the main street, loitering especially outside the deli or the pub with its long cool verandahs.

But what can add temporary interest and occasional piquancy is the influx of two or three city kids, come up to stay a couple of weeks with cousins. They usually don't even last that long, phoning their parents to come and get them, ‘it's barbaric up here'. But if they do stay, they get picked on for a while, then become part of the love-hate compulsion of loneliness and isolation. Locals are always hungry for new blood, and the smell of it wards off even the diabolical heat and gets them busy.